I wish I ate healthier during this period of time... Unfortunately I'm finding it impossible to order a grocery delivery right now (I use Walmart). So I just end up ordering Uber Eats twice a day.
I cringe when I think about how much money I'm spending on food and how unhealthy I'm eating. But I can't stop, I'm addicted to food delivery wtf.
Same, I've gone from grocery shopping every week to focusing my meals around non-perishable ingredients so I only have to go every other week. On the other hand, Wal-Mart grocery deliveries have started to become available again, and they added an option to let them leave it on your doorstep the way Amazon does.
I’m in the other camp; getting delivery has massively reduced my impulse junk food purchases. I couldn’t care less about convenience or cost differences; the reduction in impulse sugar consumption alone has been worth it.
That's awesome! Losing weight makes you feel better too IMO. It's weird but grocery delivery has made it easier to cook healthier. I can see my options better and maybe I'm less tempted because of the way groceries store stock their shelves?
Just ordered some groceries for tomorrow, hope it goes well. I find myself constantly too worn out after work to buy groceries, and buying amazon fresh is only good for some stuff.
Anecdote. I can't drive for medical reasons. I lived in an area where the walk to a grocery store was difficult. No public transit either. Seven miles round trip. It was doable, but the store didn't have the best selection.
This was several years ago, and grocery deliveries to my area. Carried a 50 to 60$ delivery surcharge. There are a growing number of food deserts. Delivery of take-out meals isn't that big to me. But delivery of good quality food, that's a bigger deal.
For me I don't mind grocery shopping. When I was in the city proper, it was on the way too or from work. I would do delivery some time. But I love too cook and get hands on ingredients. After I moved thought, my diet has tanked due to difficulty in getting food.
Exceptions are dried spices, household goods, and oils which I buy in bulk. I did hate the time in line, effort etc. But also allowed me to check out for a bit.
Now I dread it, and do most of my orders through FreshDirect. I'm sort of in a food desert. There are two grocery stores two miles away from me. There are buses that run every 1.5 hours, and take 40 minutes to get there.
I hate it because I generally have to walk. It burns about 2 hours for me. I have to carry everything back in a backpack. Uber/Lyft is 30$ per trip. It's a bigger problem for impromptu meals. Or oh I need this but forgot about it.
The other night I wanted a salmon filet over a salad. I went to the store all the ingredients together was 22$. The pub next store has a salmon entree for 15$. Sometimes the value propositions are skewed.
Just like Mr. Cvitkovic, I grew up in a very frugal environment - out of necessity. But it took me a lot of time to realize, in my adulthood, that I can now afford some tradeoffs.
Grocery delivery is big on my list. I hated, hated, hated going into malls to shop. So did my wife. So we switched to grocery delivery five or six years ago, and never looked back. And in Covid times, it is a double blessing.
Of course, it is easy to "overcorrect" and start spending too much. That is part of the process of learning, after all.
Whilst I may be young and relatively healthy (mild asthma) I'm still sticking to delivery. Near to me there are few grocery stores and if I wanted to go to a larger store I would typically take transit. I've tried to minimise my impact by only ordering every 2 weeks as opposed to every week, but it seems like this is how I can have the lowest impact given the situation.
I'm really in the same boat. Grocery delivery is a bit less insane (tip + fee = ~13% premium) because your average order size is bigger (at least for me - I usually do 200ish bucks every 1.5-2.0 weeks). I can stomach a 13% premium for delivery when I have 2-under-2 (years old) and I really don't want any of us to get covid for a variety of reasons (I can't afford (emotionally more than financially) to be down a caretaker and partner right now, can't afford (emotionally) to have either an infant or a toddler to have covid, etc etc).
Doordash is really hard for me to justify, I only use it when given gift cards etc. It can literally double the price of a meal (a $20 mcdonalds order becomes $35-40). Even during covid I still generally do curbside because that feels like a very minimal risk.
Post-covid, I'll probably use instacart/shipt maybe once or twice a year - I'm 100% sure there will be times where for whatever reason I just can't get out and the world will end if we run out of milk for the kids. But when there's not a pandemic on, taking the kids to the grocery store knocks out so many birds with one stone:
* kids get to get used to the grocery store experience
I solve this by going on a weekday morning. With WFH this isn't too bad, get up a little early, hit the grocery store by 7-8am, back and put away by standup at 9.
The only time I do grocery delivery is if I'm down with some kind of illness.
Girl, same. I am never going to the grocery store again. Thank god for the economic underclass willing to do delivery. They're like the plankton of the economic ecosystem. Without them, it all falls apart. Sad but necessary. But, as karma, delivery will eventually be the only job left for all of us, until we get deep enough into Moravec's paradox for that to eventually be automated too.
You'll do that the first 5 times, then start to feel OK with it, and not do it any more. I felt the same about ordering fruit & veg for home delivery. Nowadays I don't even think about it any more, except when people who don't get groceries delivered say they don't trust they won't get the wilted ones.
Are you otherwise healthy? If so and if you find almost every food delivery slot taken then I would say yes, you should be doing your grocery shopping in person. It's not a huge burden to change your behaviours for other people's benefit especially if others also do the same.
I'm in a city and currently don't own a car. We end up buying groceries through delivery services like instacart or peapod. If the service fails to deliver, which happens more frequently than we want, we kinda just deal with not having the food we wanted. Sometimes that means esti g a substandard meal, sometimes it means eating some frozen food we had and turning the other ingredients into a different meal the next day. It's extremely incovienent but it's better than walking to s supermarket or all the problems that come with car ownership in a city
Edit:we also ended up eating out at about an average of 2.5 nights a week every year which is much higher than when I lived in a rural area with a car
I cringe when I think about how much money I'm spending on food and how unhealthy I'm eating. But I can't stop, I'm addicted to food delivery wtf.
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