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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

#401

Post by krustyburger »

Androider wrote: post #336
krustyburger wrote: post #325

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They’re still in-store picking. It’s just that Whole Foods/Prime Now has dedicated employees for this.

It's brand new as of April, it's definitely coming from a warehouse in an area where there is no Whole Foods store (I can track the path of the delivery van in the app). It's also not someone delivering with their own truck as before, but a blue-gray Amazon van, and the availability of items is spot on which was never the case even pre-covid.

Interesting. And you’re ordering from Whole Foods in the app and not just selecting Whole Foods items from the Amazon option? I know there are many Whole Foods items available on the Amazon section now.

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

#402

Post by StellarTabi »

kerkeslager wrote: post #14
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…

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…

My branded grocery store bundles up old veggies and sells them at a steep discount, they're really good for freezing, smoothies, or cooking same day.

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

#403

Post by matz1 »

BurningFrog wrote: post #381
matz1 wrote: post #376

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I would call this epic over reaction. The actual virus is not as scary as being reported in the news. The death rate are very low. If this virus has death rate like ebola then that would be really is a disaster.

Even aside from deaths, the economic damage alone is rather epic.

That's due to the over reaction: the lockdown

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

#404

Post by bradknowles »

jonny_eh wrote: post #393
jedberg wrote: post #375

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm the designated shopper in my family, since my wife has higher risk factors for COVID-19. Usually when we go shopping, I push the cart and pick the obvious items, but leave most of the picking to her because she's very specific in what she wants. But now I have to do it. I totally sympathize with the Instacart shoppers. Even with direct access to my wife via text including pictures, it's still hard to find exactly…

Ha, same. I'll resort to facetime to figure out what that one thing she wants is.

I hated, loathed, and despised doing the shopping for my wife at Whole Foods. It’s not the store that’s the problem, it’s that she wants to graze the entire bloody flipping hot bar, and she insists I get a bunch of stuff they don’t actually have in stock, or where they ran out of stock hours ago.

She can shop for herself online, either via Whole Foods Market on Amazon, or Instacart.

Either way, I’m done.

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

#405

Post by bradknowles »

davidw wrote: post #274
monadic2 wrote: post #235

I have had so many bad experiences with instacart: * shopper buying yams rather than potatoes (note: this was not a replacement, they seemed to genuinely believe they had bought potatoes.) * shopper going to checkout before I can suggest a better replacement for an item. * shopper buys obviously moldy fruit. * shopper buys five roaster chickens as a replacement for five cornish hens. * shopper gives up really easily…

We've had an ok experience with instacart. I've tried to think of it sort of like ... when you stop at a little store in a small town before going camping, and there's not a great selection and it's kind of expensive. But you are happy to get some of the things you need, and it's ok if it's not perfect, because we're in the middle of a disaster of epic proportions. That said, I'm really looking forward to doing my ow…

One of the big problems with InstaCart is that they own the relationship with the customer — all the store knows is that InstaCart shopper #76957831 bought certain items. That’s it.

And InstaCart keeps your history, so if you want to buy those same items somewhere else that is cheaper, then InstaCart makes that easy.

These are not problems for the customer, but they are problems for any store. Any store worth doing business with should want to fully own that relationship.

InstaCart is also not tied into the back end inventory system. They know, from previous shopping trips they’ve done, what is commonly stocked where, and what might be low on stock. But they don’t know for sure until the shopper gets there and starts going down the aisle.

So, a bad experience for the store, unless you really can’t do anything better. And not a great experience for the customer.

HEB has recently started doing curbside service in our area. IMO, it’s much better than InstaCart. If they could hook that up with a delivery service, I think they’d have a goose that lays platinum eggs.

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

#406

Post by arthurcolle »

bane wrote: post #48

We decided to order a bunch of things from Costco a few weeks ago through instacart. Actually we decided to do it before then, but the site was broken for a bit. It was crazy expensive. Not only the delivery fee, the tip, etc. But every item was marked up significantly over the in-store price, with no indication that was the case. We even pulled out some old receipts to verify this price difference. Apparently part o…

Sorry for hijacking this but what happened to DeepField? I have been looking for a decent way to do named entity extraction from news articles but havent had much luck in finding decent open source libs for this but saw an old post of yours that linked to GitHub but the repo appears to be gone.

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

#407

Post by defnotashton2 »

OJFord wrote: post #73
thaeli wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The shavings from baby carrot production are still used, for juice and pulp.

For the benefit of any other perplexed non-Americans: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baby_carrot#%22Baby-cut%22_car...

Lol you don't have baby carrots, they are my fav, ready to just eat like chips. They just started selling carrot chips :O

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

#408

Post by stormdennis »

mattkrause wrote: post #303
stormdennis wrote: post #167

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I always check use-by and best before dates. When milk can have a date that's over a week away, I really hate it when someone buys milk that's use by tomorrow. Same for for bread, cheese, eggs, butter, fruit and veg, any number of items. Supermarkets naturally want to sell you the soon to expire stuff so how can you trust their pickers? The answer might be buyers and deliverers independent from the shops.

A lot of the use-by dates are more like quality suggestions or even outright marketing (how could salt go bad?!) https://www.nytimes.com/article/expiration-dates-coronavirus...

You're right but, illogical or not, given a choice I'll always take the fresher one.

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

#409

Post by dehrmann »

allengeorge wrote: post #3

I like going to the grocery store.

Not just that, I'm surprised at all the people here who switched to a delivery service. I'm sure some of them are high-risk--and I get it--but I bet a lot are generally low-risk, and the way things are looking, grocery shopping with 6 feet of distance isn't a particularly risky activity.

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

#410

Post by parasight »

kerkeslager wrote: post #14
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…

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…

In general I agree here. In case of bruised apples I am a bit picky because of patulin. It is a toxic produced in rotting apples.
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