What have you ‘ordered in’, so far?

In My Humble Opinion
21

I hope my local grocery store shopping person doesn’t think poorly of me for ordering a lot of luxery goods during a pandemic, but I’ve got a grandson turning seven and he loves lobster, so I ordered a bunch of it for later pickup. He’s already told my daughter he’s looking forward to it because he only gets it at my house, and this birthday is turning out disappointing on a couple of different levels for him.

The website said that some things might not be in stock so I ordered several different sizes of the tails, from 9 ounce down to 2.5 ounce, so I’m hoping to at least get some lobster for him. If they happen to have all of it in stock, and let’s face it, lobster tails aren’t really a good candidate for pandemic hoarders, I may end up with a metric buttload of lobster, but hey, that’s kind of a self-correcting problem, as long as you’ve got enough melted butter and tarragon.

22

Good to hear! We’d like to support our local restaurants, as well.

23

I am very reluctant to order anything in, although I have been craving various kinds of restaurant food. Is this just paranoia? I’m worried about possible contamination of the packaging containers and bags - I’ve had a number of items from Amazon delivered and I’ve followed a procedure of spraying them with bleach outside before bringing them inside. I can’t do that with food, obviously.

24

I haven’t ordered takeout food, but I did order a grocery delivery from the local grocery store. Took a week for the delivery, but that was fine. I’ve always ordered from amazon just about every week and that hasn’t stopped.

Petco delivers where I live. Or you can order online and they have curbside pickup.

25

actually since no one4 drives here anymore 90 percent of my food ordering is delivery mostly through door dash since i dont like how uber eats does things and cant use grubhub since my account was hacked ,

26

I feel we should do the same, but the Ukulele Lady is ascairt to.

Anyway, our neighborhood is infested with richies (e.g. non-cooks) who used to dine in restaurants six days a week, so I assume they’re living on take-out now, and the local restaurateurs are doing at least as well as when their dining rooms were open.

Still, dying for a pizza or meatball hero from Nonna Rosa, and some roast pork lo mein and Crispy Duck from Szechuan Delight.

27

Tonight I’m venturing out to pick up a pizza. Should be good

28

We hardly ever order out during real life. But now, we’re trying to support our local businesses.

So we’ve been getting scones, and pizza, and phô, and poké. And Friday night we had our local tavern’s fish fry! Mmmm…

29

The only food we can afford to have delivered is pizza. We ordered one despite trying to eat low-carb.; it was tolerable, but nothing great.
We thought about ordering take-out from a local restaurant, but I don’t want to eat in the car or haul bags of warmish food upstairs. Maybe when we can afford a table to eat at, that would change. Thrift stores are non-essential businesses, so we will go without for the duration.

We don’t order in things we can buy here, and we haven’t needed anything we can’t find, so really, nothing.

30

I mail-ordered some simple gym equipment, since I can’t go to the gym. I routinely buy stuff on the internet and have it shipped, but that’s not something I would ordinarily have bought on-line.

31

We’ve been picking up takeout from a few local breweries and restaurants, in an attempt to help them survive.

Last night we had lobster rolls from a food truck that parked by a brewery, so wo got a growler as well. Saturday night we got a quarantine special meal from a brewery. A couple of pounds of bbq brisket, sauce, sautéed onions, buns, mac&cheese, baked beans, Cole slaw, potato chips for $45. We are still eating it.

32

Just ordered printer paper. Husband and I are both working from home and I can’t go to work to steal some

33

We were out of town when the insanity started to hit. Luckily we always have a solid level of pantry/freezer foods, but were quite low on fresh produce (and I was really glad I had bought the extra gallon of milk before we left town so we would have it for coffee the morning after arrival). However, we were low on cat litter, and down to our last few rolls of toilet paper. So we have ordered:

  • Cat litter (and cat food, though we didn’t quite need that yet, but I wanted to make the minimum order level to qualify for free shipping anyway) from Chewy. We normally order the food from there anyway - it’s prescription and expensive, and they have the best prices.

  • Groceries, etc. from Costco - they didn’t have TP, but they had Kleenex, so we ordered it, plus a bunch of pantry goods that we will use eventually (coffee, dried fruit, nuts, cooking oil), plus some melatonin that I use regularly and was almost out of anyway. The 2-day delivery is more like 5 - 6 days right now, but hopefully it will arrive soon.

  • Some hair stuff (conditioner, etc.) to deal with my giant ball of frizz - stuff I normally use and am almost out of.

  • I did my first-ever order of perishable groceries for curbside pickup at a smallish local grocery store. It was surprisingly painless; they had basically everything except the obvious (TP, Kleenex, aloe vera gel) with a couple of minor substitutions - Mexican crema instead of sour cream, and a different variety of frozen fruit. Ordered online, they called as they were picking the order about substitutions, again when the order was ready, and we called to let them know when they were in the parking lot to tell them what kind of car we were in. Groceries were loaded directly into the trunk. I don’t know that it’s a service I would use normally (I like to decide what to buy based on what looks good that day), but it was awesome for this situation, and no price markups or trying to snag an Instacart delivery time!

  • While we were still out of town, I decided to order some more veggie seeds so we can plant lettuce in the backyard.

I don’t know how much we will patronize restaurants anytime soon - in mid-February, I apparently picked the absolute worst moment to quit a job without another one lined up (for the first time since I was 16, for health reasons), so that’s more than half our household income. We have savings, or I wouldn’t have done it, but I wasn’t expecting the economy to crater or I might have tried to stick it out in spite of how crappy it was making me feel!

34

Other than food, I’ve ordered dog supplies from Chewy (all of their shipping, even for autoships, is delayed by at least a week) and next week I’m expecting the only Subscribe & Save thing I get from Amazon – which I thought might be delayed, but yesterday I got the “we’re preparing your auto-delivery” email and it seems like it’ll arrive on schedule.

I live alone and don’t cook, but I made a big grocery store run on 3/18 and just ate what I’d bought for a week. Then it occurred to me to start ordering dinner, to help my home supplies last longer, and I went on a bit of a bender:

Wednesday: Delivery (via DoorDash) from Astro Doughnuts & Fried Chicken. I got chicken strips, a cheddar biscuit, tater tots, and a fancy doughnut. The chicken was good (but not great), and the tater tots were disappointingly overcooked, but the biscuit and doughnut were awesome. I don’t plan to order from there again.

Thursday: Takeout from Olive Garden. I’d planned to order two entrees, so I’d have food the next day, too, and one of them came with another entree. Like many places, they’ve instituted a “we’ll bring it to your car when you arrive” policy. Even before all of this I would get takeout from Olive Garden every few months, so I’ll do it again…but not any time soon, because I wind up eating too much fettucine alfredo!

Saturday: Delivery (via GrubHub) from Ted’s Bulletin. Soft pretzel bites, a burger, and a mini banana cream pie. All very yummy; I’m likely to order from there (and those particular items) again.

Yesterday: Lunch takeout from Panera. My best friends (married couple + their son) and I had a “distant picnic” at their place: I parked in front of their neighbor’s house and sat in front of my car, while they sat near the top of their driveway (camp chairs, folding tables, etc.). We sat outside for about an hour, eating lunch and catching up.

I am very lucky that my salary isn’t affected by any of this, and also that I live in an area with a lot of nearby restaurants (the delivery/takeout options are almost overwhelming). I need to rein in the ordering, though, because (a) the costs will quickly add up and (b) my waistline will quickly expand…

35

As far as delivery food, nada, we are six miles from the nearest milk, and calling for delivery from anywhere results in laughter.

The jungle is well represented, however.

36

We’ve had two grocery orders delivered over the course of two weeks. We also ordered a year’s worth of vitamins for our family via an online vitamin seller. And from Amazon we ordered a bunch of bar soap and an infrared thermometer (our under-the-tongue model recently crapped out).

37

I haven’t ordered anything in. For me, my desire to keep healthy by minimizing contact with anybody else (including delivery drivers, take-out cashiers, etc.) supersedes any need to “support small local businesses.”

38

We get a regular caravan of books and stuff delivered to our door normally, that has abated slightly but not entirely.

Foodwise, in the past 2 weeks, we’ve ordered food for delivery about 5 times… Pizza, Chinese soup dumplings (2x), Peruvian (chicken, rice, beans, pork), and ice cream. We usually prefer to go out than to order in, but you gotta do what you gotta do. Later this week we will probably order sushi, and/or pizza again. Probably “and”.

I can’t quite fathom the people who can buy 2+ weeks of groceries, or a month, at a time. Where does it all go? Just dry and canned foods? Bread and milk don’t last more than a week and a half, at most. Same with meats and cheeses, unless you freeze everything, and the freezer in my fridge is only so big (mostly filled with frozen dumplings right now, haha).

I go out for fresh air at least 30 mins. a day to walk around the block or something, or to shoot basketball in my own backyard. And I still go for leisure drives, the “Sunday driving” of yore, just to feel a bit normal. I don’t go anywhere, just do a 2-3 hour drive somewhere scenic and back.

There is extremely minimal risk from food deliveries, especially if they leave it at the doorstep. You’re more likely to get it from “aerosol” virus exposure if someone sick coughed into the air and it blew into your face a block away on a windy day.

I have also done drive-thru food buys (KFC… I’m not proud…) and order online, pay online or over the phone with CC, run-in-and-pick-up food orders from local restaurants that are operating that way I’d like to see stay in business. The biggest risk there is touching the door handles, and making sure some idiot isn’t loitering at the door or the pickup counter (and waiting until they leave if there is one). So I open the door through my sleeve, or most often, just enter/exit when someone else is exiting/entering so they’re touching it instead of me (usually someone with gloves, which I don’t wear).

39

We’ve ordered mostly grocery delivery. Actually, a shitload of grocery delivery since my mom is temporarily staying with us. Her diet is night and day different from ours and she won’t budge an inch, so I have to buy her special food and cook it for her or she’ll just refuse to eat (or she’ll just eat cookies instead of actual food).

Other than that, we’ve gotten Door Dash a couple of times and I ordered TP from Sam’s, which I hope will get here. Most of the stores close to me sell out of TP within about 30 minutes of opening and I have meetings in the morning, so there’s no other good way of getting any. The great irony of everyone else’s hoarding is that it creates a hoarding mentality among people who don’t hoard, so the whole situation seems to be feeding on itself, at least locally.

The most frivolous thing I have ordered is a three-month subscription to KnitCrate. The project I received recently looks delightful, but between my mom’s move and managing everyone’s meals and working full time I haven’t had a chance to put that to the test.

40

Who’s contacting anyone? I haven’t touched another human being in…hmm…at least two weeks. As robardin mentioned, delivery services are leaving things on doorsteps. The two takeout orders were brought out to my car and placed on my passenger seat (at my request). I handed a $20 bill to a homeless guy the other day, but otherwise all monetary transactions have been online or via credit card terminal. There was even a protective screen in front of the cashier at the grocery store yesterday.