Previously I wrote about effective grocery shopping. I won’t remind you to use a list. You know that already, right? I’ve talked about having a plan for what you’re purchasing and a scheme to avoid backtracking on your journey. In the future I’ll be adding more thoughts about maximizing your time in the store, but for today I want to talk about thinking differently.
Have you considered avoiding the store all together?
It’s not possible to do this entirely (yet) and there is a cost associated…but the time savings are tremendous. Plus you’ll save your sanity. That’s definitely in short supply these days, so it’s at least worth considering.
When I think about grocery shopping, I envision the way my Mom did it in the 1960s (yeah, I’m old). We would pile into the car, drive to the store, grab a cart, and maneuver through the aisles, filling the basket. We would unload at checkout, pay, pile the groceries into the car, and drive home. Once there, we’d unpack the bags and stow everything. Week after week, year after year that was the pattern. Sure, some trips were bigger than others. Occasionally we’d have a quicker trip to purchase something forgotten. Yet for the most part the entire theater played itself out over and over with minimal variation. It was almost as if we were caught in an endless loop.
When I moved out I took that pattern of weekly grocery shopping with me. The stores were bigger and fancier, but my approach was no different than it had been from Mom’s when I was five. I’d take my list, do the shopping at the store, drag it home, and stow it. Seven days later, rinse and repeat.
As the Hectic Clan grew, we were buying in ever-increasing quantities. At one point, with four kids under four years old I was pushing two carts…one entirely filled with baby and toddler food. Checking out was ridiculous with me having to put hundreds of baby food jars onto the checkout belt and then turn around and stow them in our pantry when I got home. Honestly I got tired of it really quickly, but my growing brood wouldn’t put up with not eating. When our fifth kiddo was born the oldest three were already off jarred food, and for whatever reason we never started him on it. Finally the plethora of little jars was eliminated. But the overall quantity of food kept increasing.
About that time, warehouse stores came to our region. Their introduction was huge for us. Sure, we bought lots of non-grocery items there. But we bought tons of foodstuffs too. We were one of the few families that could go there once a week and stock up…only to have a threadbare pantry seven days later. No matter how much food I bought…my ravenous crew would consume it. While I was now shopping at two different stores for food, the money savings were worth it. Plus the kids loved Sam’s for some reason. I never quite understood it. Oddly, our trips were great family time…so it was never really a problem to make the trip. I always had company and the kids loved it. Weird, right?
As the kids got older, they got involved in sports, sometimes in more than one during a particular season. And with the increase in activity, their demands for food increased. Since they were also awesome athletes, they recognized that the quality of their food mattered. Swimming was the first sport that most of them competed in. At one point I had seven of them competing simultaneously. Since our oldest was a national-quality swimmer, she was exposed to a lot more nutritional information than the others. We heard about it at swim meets, in swimming magazines, and in the websites popping up about swimming. And since swimmers eat a ridiculously huge number of calories, even Michael Phelps’ 12,000 calories a day seemed a little low to us. My daughter was eating 12,000 calories a day and losing weight. We had to bump her to 15,000 just to keep her weight consistent! Imagine being able to eat 7.5 times the recommended daily allowance (RDA) for food. It sounds great, until you realize that those can’t be empty calories. Nutrition mattered, so I struggled to create meals she could eat and that she liked. It was a chore…and buying all that food was tough.
Yet, you do what you have to do for your kids. It’s part of the reason I got good at cooking and managing everything in my kitchen. I had to, there was no other choice.
As the years went by my shopping routine remained constant. It was essentially the same as it’d been when Lyndon Johnson was President! Eventually the kids started going off to college and beyond. Finally our food demands dropped dramatically. But somehow it took took me the same time to shop. I guess there’s just a minimum amount of time required for a trip. It was still taking over an hour every danged week and frankly that was frustrating. Something had to give, but I had no idea how to improve things.
Then along came online ordering. First it started with bulky items like toilet paper (yeah, we do use a lot of that), paper towels, napkins, and zippered storage bags. Anything you could buy in the paper and household items aisles became available from the likes of Amazon, Walmart online, etc. Then a couple new players entered the fray, namely Jet.com and Boxed. Amazon Prime Pantry came to my attention about the same time. Now I could buy non-perishable food items without having to go to the grocery store. It was a huge time saver. When the three services debuted, their prices were astonishingly low. Sometimes there was an negligible delivery fee associated with the order, but even factoring that in, I was saving money. More importantly, I was saving up to four hours every month buying loads of stuff online and having it shipped directly to my door. Sure I still had to haul it into the house and stow it, but that happened no matter where I bought it. I continued to keep my running list, but ordered items as I needed them, rather than bundling them all into a gigantic shopping trip. I could order just-in-time for what I needed. Better yet, I discovered that I didn’t have to order in huge bulk quantities, since the smaller packages were often at the same price per unit as the colossal mega-packs.
I was able to be more judicious with my time in the store. I cut my grocery shopping to an average of 30 minutes per week, and sometimes didn’t go every week. We still needed dairy goods and fresh produce, but there wasn’t much else that I needed to buy on a weekly basis. Because the items were easy to select, my kids were often able to pick up the slack on some of the trips. It got to the point where I was saving six hours a month by delegating trips to the kids and ordering online.
But our local stores weren’t to be outdone. They must’ve noticed that I wasn’t shopping there as much!
Dillons (part of the Kroger family) was the first to offer their ClickList service. You create a shopping list online, select a time for pickup, and pay online. Then you drive to the store, they load your car, and you drive home. The timing was perfect for their rollout…I’d just had my knee operated on and walking was difficult. For several months I never set foot in the grocery store. It was weird after all those years to not go inside…but honestly I didn’t miss it.
Walmart followed suit with Walmart Grocery a few months later. To give you an idea of how early an adopter I am, I was customer #3 at the local store.
Soon I was ordering online every two weeks and interleaved those trips with a super-fast trip into the supermarket. My time-saving increased exponentially as I got better at linking those trips with other errands. It normally takes under 10 minutes to get the groceries loaded, compared to my former trips of 60-90 minutes. That’s a huge savings in time!
With all that said, there are a few downsides to ordering items online. The produce and meat may not be exactly what you would select. The folks doing the picking aren’t you. I’m not saying they purposely pick things that don’t match my preferences; they have no way of knowing my preferences. Sure, you can put in notes in the apps (“Green bananas please”), but that’s just not the same. There are still some things that I would rather select myself…hence my infrequent and brief trips to the store. But for things that are packaged and require very little thought…these systems are golden. If you’ve ever spent too much time looking for an item, online shopping is the way to go. For instance, water chestnuts appear in a vast array of recipes that are fan favorites at Hectic Manor. Unfortunately, depending on the time of year those suckers are hard to find. It’s like the store moves them around on purpose. But it’s irritating as heck. I’d much rather have some high school kid do my searching for the water chestnuts than me expanding my time.
Overall though, the benefits of not going to the store outweigh the detractions. One hidden benefit is it’s hard to be enticed by things you didn’t plan to buy. I make my list one day and then complete it the next. Before I finalize the list I review it very carefully to ensure that I really need everything on the list. Sure, we still get fun things that have limited nutritional value…that’s life. But I’m much less likely to make an impulse buy when I’m looking at a sterile onscreen list rather than the enticing marketing package that’s designed to break down my resolve. Add to that the massive times savings and I’m pretty sold on skipping the store entirely.
How about you, have you used any of the online ordering solutions? Do you have any bits of wisdom to share about making it a better solution?
No matter if you’ve never ordered online or your a regular user, it’s something to think about. Let’s face it, the goal is to make it a great day in the kitchen…so the more time you can spend in there doing the part you love, the better!
Online Ordering Links
