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Americans, it turns out, would rather visit a store than buy food online

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Re: Americans, it turns out, would rather visit a store than buy food online

#121

Post by majormajor »

Animats wrote: post #91

The current big problem with online food shopping is that it's being done by sending low-wage people into ordinary supermarkets. This is inefficient, but until recently this was a niche market. The trouble with doing it that way is that the ordering system doesn't know the inventory. You get some subset of your order. That's no good. Webvan tried to do it right 20 years go, with local fulfillment centers and automati…

Amazon does this sort of direct fulfillment under the Prime Now name. They don't do a great job of keeping a consistent set of things in stock, though.

Kroger brands also do this. But you can still get inventory problems - something the system thinks is in stock on Monday at noon when you place the order can be gone by Tuesday at 6 when they're packing your order for you.

Both of those have been way better in my experience than Instacart, though.

Re: Americans, it turns out, would rather visit a store than buy food online

#122

Post by pdonis »

kerkeslager wrote: post #45
denimnerd42 wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You don't get any discount in this case though. You're still paying $2-3/lb for bruised apples that are like you said literally waste at that point and $2-5/lb for chicken that if you picked out yourself would be of higher quality. Even if they did give you a price break for lower quality food. They'd still do things like give you a pineapple that will never ripen before it rots like we received last week.

What I'm saying is that your perception of quality is not actually objective quality.

Neither is yours. But if yours is satisfied with the food you can get by ordering online, you're free to order online.

Re: Americans, it turns out, would rather visit a store than buy food online

#123

Post by charwalker »

Ordering online is incredibly difficult and each time I try via a different site/store I end up dropping it after investing almost an hour to sort things out. I am in the Seattle area so it's been a big deal.

My recent example is the Safeway site and trying to make an order for pickup or delivery. Initially I picked delivery, gave it my address, and it let me add things to my cart. I built out my entire cart normally, avoiding items listed as not in stock, then when I went to check out it gave me 0 delivery openings for like a week.

I then swapped to pick up and it attempted to reconcile out of stock items in my cart with alternatives but for many I had to go back in and find alternatives. Items not reconciled where dropped from my cart so I ahd to manually check that against my list to see what was missing. On checkout, it gave me 0 times to pick up going out a week.

So I swapped locations again and went through reconciling my cart again and picking out new items when needed. Again it dropped some items without alternatives so I had to check my cart against my list and again go through finding missing items. hen I went to check out, it again listed 0 openings for the next week. Trying to pick a new option reset my cart in some ways to the point I dropped it altogether.

I went to one of the Safeway locations that day and a bunch of out of stock or similar items were actually there and I was checked out in half an hour, mask and gloves on, just fine. Maybe instacart or other premium services have this figured out. I haven't tried amazon fresh much too. But if they work anything like the Safeway systems then I'll risk the store run to save myself an hour of pointless online shopping and save on the premium or cost of delivery.

Re: Americans, it turns out, would rather visit a store than buy food online

#124

Post by pdonis »

nitwit005 wrote: post #80
ping_pong wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's a great marketing gimmick that some companies have made, but it's largely false. https://www.vox.com/the-goods/2019/2/26/18240399/food-waste-...

> But when a crop is complete, farmers plow everything back into the soil. Some of it ends up as organic matter that is supporting soil health, and that is okay, too. Basically declaring that the waste is not waste. Solving problems by changing definitions.

No, pointing out that what some people call waste is not actually being wasted, it is serving a useful purpose. "Waste" means it is serving no useful purpose at all.

Re: Americans, it turns out, would rather visit a store than buy food online

#125

Post by bpyne »

analog31 wrote: post #38

My experience with online food shopping has been mixed. They actually did a good job of picking veggies for me. My family doesn't eat a lot of meat, so that's not super important. The headaches are in ordering and delivery. The ordering systems have the look and feel of having been bought from one vendor, while their inventory system is from another, and never the twain shall meet. Bar codes were invented for invento…

I had the same thought about delivery-only stores. Honestly, I'm in support of it. I hate driving. But grocery stores are not up to the task right now with order and delivery systems.

Re: Americans, it turns out, would rather visit a store than buy food online

#126

Post by Invictus0 »

makerofspoons wrote: post #113

I have decreased the amount of choice and the amount of shipping required for my food by switching to powdered nutritional shakes like Huel and Soylent. No need to worry about the picker getting the wrong thing and there is less need to worry about the colossal amount of plastic waste my weekly shopping used to create. I feel great and I only wish that there were some way to buy various 'lents in a reusable container…

Are you using Soylent as your only source of food? I have Soylent for breakfast most days and it has done nothing to decrease the amount of choice in my groceries; it replaces cereal and milk but I still have to go shopping for everything else.

Re: Americans, it turns out, would rather visit a store than buy food online

#127

Post by darrylb42 »

hinkley wrote: post #101
klyrs wrote: post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Recent substitutions I've seen (where I specified "no substitutions"): Ice cream flavors: my favorite for something I'd never pick (still ate it, annoyed) Margarine instead of butter -- the heck? Won't use it. Vanilla yogurt in place of plain yogurt. Slowly eating it for breakfast, annoyed; can't use it in savory dishes which is what it's for. Juices: I can't stand sugar alcohols, and got a ton of crap full of sucral…

Not justifying it, but try dewatering the yogurt and see if that does anything for your savory dishes. I don't think I have the right gauge of strainer and end up using leftover coffee filters.

Dewatering is not going to remove the flavor and sugar in vanilla yogurt.

Re: Americans, it turns out, would rather visit a store than buy food online

#128

Post by klyrs »

hinkley wrote: post #101
klyrs wrote: post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Recent substitutions I've seen (where I specified "no substitutions"): Ice cream flavors: my favorite for something I'd never pick (still ate it, annoyed) Margarine instead of butter -- the heck? Won't use it. Vanilla yogurt in place of plain yogurt. Slowly eating it for breakfast, annoyed; can't use it in savory dishes which is what it's for. Juices: I can't stand sugar alcohols, and got a ton of crap full of sucral…

Not justifying it, but try dewatering the yogurt and see if that does anything for your savory dishes. I don't think I have the right gauge of strainer and end up using leftover coffee filters.

It's the sugar and vanilla flavoring that I find offensive -- are you suggesting that both would be addressed by dewatering? I can imagine it taking care of the sugar (with several washings, I suppose?) since it's water soluble, but I think that the vanilla would be irredeemably dissolved into the milkfat.

Alas, I've gone back to shopping due to these experiences, so I've got a tub of the good stuff already. So on one hand this is all academic, but you've caught my academic curiosity :)

Re: Americans, it turns out, would rather visit a store than buy food online

#129

Post by charwalker »

elmerfud wrote: post #2

It's not that I want to visit the store it's that I can't trust the store people to properly pick out fresh produce or good meat. When the stock person just takes a bucket of apples and dumps them in without care so most of them are bruised, why would I want that same person selecting which apples to send me? Often times to find 3 apples I have to examine 10+. Most of the produce selection is this way. Meat selection…

I'm super picky about my apples after growing up near an awesome apple orchard. I only buy a few types unless making a pie or similar. Each type has certain features I look at. I like eating crisp Fuji apples the most and usually only buy those based on coloring, shape, and the sound it makes when I pop it into my hand like one might a baseball into a baseball glove. The sound is critical to finding a crisp vs soft apple. No way I'm leaving fresh produce/meat selection to a random staffer, especially not apples.

Re: Americans, it turns out, would rather visit a store than buy food online

#130

Post by TuringNYC »

denimnerd42 wrote: post #20
kerkeslager wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Playing devil's advocate: an enormous amount of food waste is caused by people simply refusing to buy ugly food. It's literally less wasteful to shave off most of a carrot so that it's a baby carrot, than to try to sell the same carrots as-is. There's nothing wrong with the ugly carrots--but they'll rot on the shelves. Bruised apples are perfectly edible. Maybe you just don't like them, and that's fine--there's no ac…

You don't get any discount in this case though. You're still paying $2-3/lb for bruised apples that are like you said literally waste at that point and $2-5/lb for chicken that if you picked out yourself would be of higher quality. Even if they did give you a price break for lower quality food. They'd still do things like give you a pineapple that will never ripen before it rots like we received last week.

When I lived in Brooklyn, the standard at most fruit/veg vendors was to have the best stuff inside and the bruised stuff outside (e.g., at 40cents/lb discount.) We usually brought from the outside and did the math on whether the recoverable portion was worth the discount.

Unfortunately the supermarkets do not work this way -- they seem to have one class of goods. I'm not sure what happens to their bruised goods, but I do wonder if they offload those items to other stores? Does it really go straight into the trash?

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