Food shopping definitely sucks, and on top of the time commitment, having to keep a catalogue of typical prices per quantity and freshness/ripeness-determining markers in one's head is fairly burdensome. One of those great things the truly rich don't have any reason to do/learn unless they just feel like it.
I'm skeptical of the value of these services overall but the more I think about time savings and not having to worry about keeping up my otherwise-useless food-buying skills they could be worth it, though only if they all but completely removed my need to grocery shop. And I think the prices would still have to come down a little more.
What'd be more valuable is a grocery store with online ordering and curbside pickup with some kind of enforceable (like, with real teeth, not "oh yeah, we tried to screw you, here's a voucher for the $1.50 difference, bet you're glad you spent two hours getting us to pay up!") guarantee that they wouldn't sell me anything over the average price for my area. Infeasible now, but imagine if government tweaked the information imbalance to be a bit less out of customers' favor by mandating (or incentivizing) machine-readable posting of prices week to week... then such a service could exist, could be audited, could be more-or-less trusted. And would save huge numbers of hours and lots of fuel for driving around comparison shopping and other useless consumer BS we (those not rich enough to pay others to worry about this useless crap) currently put up with as practically a second job.
We get this in the UK - I can order from Tesco or Asda and get it delivered to my door.
"Price promise" price matches lowest price in area for branded goods like Heinz baked beans. It's cheaper in UK to pick supermarket own brand, in which case there is the issue that I like Tesco baked beans but not Asda baked beans.
And Tesco offer a "as you would pick it yourself" on fresh food where they pick the longest shelf life fresh food. But Tesco failed and lost a lot of money in the US market.
I wonder why the UK has good supermarket delivery and the US does not.
I'm in Canada and I buy from an online grocery store, Grocery Gateway. They're run by one of the local grocery chains and other than a $9.99 delivery fee, it's basically just a regular grocery store as they carry what's in that grocery chain, including the supermarket brand stuff.
I'm skeptical of the value of these services overall but the more I think about time savings and not having to worry about keeping up my otherwise-useless food-buying skills they could be worth it, though only if they all but completely removed my need to grocery shop. And I think the prices would still have to come down a little more.
What'd be more valuable is a grocery store with online ordering and curbside pickup with some kind of enforceable (like, with real teeth, not "oh yeah, we tried to screw you, here's a voucher for the $1.50 difference, bet you're glad you spent two hours getting us to pay up!") guarantee that they wouldn't sell me anything over the average price for my area. Infeasible now, but imagine if government tweaked the information imbalance to be a bit less out of customers' favor by mandating (or incentivizing) machine-readable posting of prices week to week... then such a service could exist, could be audited, could be more-or-less trusted. And would save huge numbers of hours and lots of fuel for driving around comparison shopping and other useless consumer BS we (those not rich enough to pay others to worry about this useless crap) currently put up with as practically a second job.