Comments on: Who Needs Grocery Stores? (I Do)

By: TARDIStime

TARDIStime — Thu, 06 Sep 2012 02:07:50 +0000

The best form of grocery shopping I’ve seen is the experimental trial that Coles ran in Sydney along Parramatta Road at one of its petrol stations.
You hop on the Coles website, order what you want and pay for it there. You get a special receipt emailed to you with a key code in it and at the petrol station on your way home, open your special locker with the key code and there’s all the shopping you ordered, ready for you to load into the car and drive home.
Perfect for those who aren’t home to accept grocery deliveries during the day but still want to shop online! Not perfect for me because a) I’m a public transport commuter and b) Parramatta Road is not on my way home. :-(

By: km1312

km1312 — Wed, 05 Sep 2012 14:04:22 +0000

I am all Fresh Direct, all the time (other than occasional milk run to the grocery store or specialty purchase at the farmer’s market), because I am the Milleni-est, and the laziest.

Honestly, though, living in a neighborhood where I would have to walk several blocks to and from the grocery store, and not being able to buy anything in large amounts (because I can only take what I can carry home), I think Fresh Direct is a better deal for – I order the products I use regularly in bulk once a month or so, freeze a lot of it, and always have food on hand.

It still makes me feel like a lazy bum, though.

By: keightdee

keightdee — Wed, 05 Sep 2012 06:05:59 +0000

The more interesting nugget of this report is that bit about brand loyalty. While I’ve noticed that many of my peers don’t particularly care what brand of a food product they buy, you will have a hard finding the same kind of brand egalitarianism in, say, consumer electronics. But I live in the Bay Area so YMMV.

By: RachelG8489

RachelG8489 — Wed, 05 Sep 2012 00:24:18 +0000

@RocketSurgeon I think I’m further up than you- Fairway is not walkable from my apartment, but the 110th St Westside Market totally is. My other walkable options are Garden of Eden (also expensive and lacking in staples) or Whole Foods. So: Westside! And at this time of year I try to buy as much produce as possible at the greenmarkets, which is surprisingly affordable.

By: Megano!

Megano! — Tue, 04 Sep 2012 23:30:07 +0000

Really the only thing anyone needs to know about what millenials like to buy is that we like to buy what is cheapest, and are not afraid of using less conventional methods (like internet) to do so.

By: MuffyStJohn

MuffyStJohn — Tue, 04 Sep 2012 21:07:34 +0000

@stuffisthings Yep, this is super annoying. I live near a Harris Teeter, a Safeway, a Yes!, and Eastern Market. And I shop at all 4 places for different things (plus I throw in trips to the Whole Foods near my school for good measure). HT is irrationally expensive unless things are on sale, but their Fage is cheap and their cheese selection is amazing. Safeway sells the dry food my cat likes, and also canned goods. Yes! has the weird hippie-granola-crunchy shit (and bulk items like quinoa) that are staples of my diet. Eastern Market has like 8000 different kinds of sausage and, on the weekends, the juiciest fucking peaches you will ever eat. And of course, Whole Foods has everything delicious and amazing I can rarely afford.

By: RocketSurgeon

RocketSurgeon — Tue, 04 Sep 2012 20:57:10 +0000

@RachelG8489 I live in that neighborhood too, and am pretty much a one-stop Fairway shopper. Trader Joe’s is good for some things, but the fact that their veggies often aren’t that great and the crowds usually sends me elsewhere. Westside Market is so expensive, except for certain random items (but they do have good and cheap pre-made salads for lunch if you’re in a hurry).

By: probs

probs — Tue, 04 Sep 2012 20:46:04 +0000

@stuffisthings comparison shopping in DC is so difficult. I seriously have no frame of reference dor what most things should cost. DC grocery stores have me in some sort of superstition-inducing Skinnerian variable rate reinforcement schedule.

By: probs

probs — Tue, 04 Sep 2012 20:39:30 +0000

@probs I should specify that by “old people” I mean the elderly, not “anyone older than millenials.” That would not be a very sensible or useful definition of “old people.”

By: stuffisthings

stuffisthings — Tue, 04 Sep 2012 20:37:52 +0000

Maybe if every grocery store in DC didn’t randomly charge two or three times as much as their competitors for certain products, I would just pick one and shop there. I’m looking at you, Harris Teeter $5 loaf of not-that-good bread…