You may still shop in the supermarket, but many of your fellow consumers are opting out. Instead, they’re picking up their food and drinks at the grocery without ever leaving the car — or not bothering to leave their home and having everything delivered.
While that may have once sounded fanciful, a waste of money or even lazy (is there any chore we can’t outsource?), it has become a big business. The largest supermarket chains, like Kroger and Wal-Mart, have been rolling out grocery pickup to new stores every other day, it seems, and it’s becoming more common, especially in bigger cities, to see grocery delivery trucks zipping around neighborhoods.
[See: What It Costs to Outsource Your Most Dreaded Tasks.]
Still, if you’re going to do it, you can mess things up to where you really aren’t saving much time or money. In fact, you might be wasting both. If you want a better shopping experience with grocery delivery or pickup, remember the following.
If you’re picking up groceries, avoid the “rush hour.” Vickie MacFadden, a marketing professional in Greenville, South Carolina, has been using grocery pickup services since the early 2000s.
“Ask the store when is their busy time and avoid that slot for pickups,” MacFadden says.
Why? Because you don’t want to decide to pick up your weekly groceries on the way home from work only to discover that 100 other shoppers opted to do the same thing, and then spend 45 minutes in traffic, snaking your way through the supermarket parking lot.
[See: 11 Ways to Save Time and Money.]
Do the math on delivery and pickup. If you’ve never had groceries delivered or done the pickup, don’t let the novelty get the better of your common sense. Crunch the numbers and make sure you’re getting the best deal you can, and know what you’re getting into first. After all, there will be a charge, for both pickup and delivery, and the cost varies depending on the store and service. There may be a minimum order for your local supermarket to let you pick up your groceries (which makes some sense, to keep people from driving up to get, say, the candy bar they ordered).
For instance, Lisa Rowan, a writer for the website, The Penny Hoarder, lives in the District of Columbia and doesn’t have a car, and so she uses Peapod for typical grocery needs and Instacart for more immediate needs and wants.
Using a delivery service makes sense for her, since she has no car. Going by bus costs at least $3.60, and she can only carry so much, even if she brings a backpack. Still, Rowan says, “Grocery delivery isn’t cheap. About $8 per order, plus tip, if I use Peapod, and about $5 plus tip, if I choose Instacart.”
Meanwhile, in New York City, Roger Ma, a certified financial planner, has his groceries delivered from FreshDirect. Ma says he pays $119 a year for unlimited delivery. Otherwise, he would incur a $5.99 delivery fee for each order, which would add up fast if you use the service frequently. That would come to over $300 in delivery costs if you were to use the grocery delivery service once a week.
Whatever delivery service you’re using, you also will want to tip your driver, unless you want to feel like a jerk on each visit. So the money you’re paying for your convenience adds up. Still, depending how inconvenient grocery shopping is, it may be well worth it.
Check your receipt after getting your groceries. Just as the folks manning fast food drive-thrus might get your order wrong, grocery stores are staffed with human beings. Sometimes they blow it.
“Always check the receipt,” advises Beth Ball, who owns a marketing firm in Eugene, Oregon, and used to get her groceries delivered all the time when she lived in Fargo, North Dakota.
“Sometimes they forgot to put an item in I was charged for. No big deal. It happens — they were always willing to fix it,” Ball says.
A lot of people in Fargo use grocery delivery services, according to Ball.
“I never actually stepped foot in the grocery stores. It was wonderful because winters are harsh. Nobody wants to get the kids dressed in all their gear and grocery shop,” Ball says.
Use the website’s shopping list. “If there are meals that you make frequently, you can save all the grocery items you need for those meals into a shopping list,” Ma says.
Later, when you want to make the same meal, Ma says you can alert the grocery website, and all of the items will come up on the list.
“It saves you a lot of time and you avoid having to search for each individual item every time you make a meal,” Ma says.
MacFadden is also a fan of the online shopping lists. She was recently approached by a local company that offers delivery service, and because she was going to have to provide them with an extensive grocery list every time she shopped with them, she declined.
“Only order from companies where a master shopping list can be saved on their website,” she advises.
That’s why Naomi Hattaway, a real estate agent and relocation specialist in Columbus, Ohio, likes the service Shipt. She says the app saves frequent orders.
“It makes it super easy to create a rotating order for the regular items you need on repeat. Think milk, bread, eggs, jam,” Hattaway says. She adds that she also likes that Shipt offers suggestions on dinner ideas.
[See: 12 Habits of Phenomenally Frugal Families.]
Don’t forget coupons. Many grocery delivery services offer coupons and coupon codes for first-time shoppers, but also for regulars, although sometimes there are quirks. With Peapod, for instance, you can use manufacturer coupons, but they’ll be credited to your account and can be used in a future order. For grocery store pickups, you can usually use manufacturer coupons, although at the moment, Wal-Mart doesn’t allow that.
Still, for the most part, if clipping coupons is your thing, and you’re strategic about it, you can still save money. Even as grocery shopping becomes increasingly more futuristic, some things never change.
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Doing Grocery Delivery or Pickup? 5 Tips for a Better Shopping Experience originally appeared on usnews.com
