Drive-by Groceries

A few weeks ago I decided to try out one of the curbside pickup services offered by our local supermarkets. I’ve avoided them for several years now, partly because I prefer surveying the products on offer before making my selections, and partly because there are some things I want to check for myself – expiration dates, freshness and lack of mold, amount of fat and/or gristle, and so on. I trust the company not to try to pass off expired goods on me, if only because of the massive legal and regulatory problems that would cause them, but the difference between something that expires on Thursday and something that is good until the following Monday can be important in my household, especially when you only go shopping once a week. Recently, though, there have been offsetting considerations…

 Unless you’ve been living on another planet since January of 2020 you already know about the world-wide health crisis that makes going out in public a risky proposition, but there are other issues worth the mention here. For example, I already didn’t like people who insist on standing close enough to you in a checkout line that you can tell what they had for lunch; these days, though, that’s practically germ warfare. I also hate people who insist on arguing with the cashier about every price, why the store should accept coupons for things they aren’t actually buying, or why corporate has chosen to impose any one of hundreds of policies. And don’t get me started on people who insist on trying every credit card they own – three times each – before reluctantly admitting that they may not have paid their bills in a while…

And who’s even mentioned people who won’t wear a mask, or who insist on explaining at length why they have the legal, moral, political, or religious right to infect anyone they want to yet?

I’m not going to specify which vendor I was using, any unless you are from this part of the country you probably haven’t heard of it anyway, but like most supermarket chains these days they have their own smartphone app and a website where you can pick out the items you want to purchase. First, the good news: setting up an account isn’t difficult, and the website isn’t hard to navigate. It can take a very long time scrolling through lists of products to find the exact size and flavor you want, and the “search” function isn’t as much help as you’d probably expect, but setting up the order isn’t hard.

 Finding the pick-up location was a bit of a challenge the first time. There are eight parking spaces on one side of the lot with a phone number to call when you arrive, but the parking lot is big enough to land a 747 on, and there’s no indication of where the pick-up spaces are. You also have to plan out the trip in advance – there is a lead time before they can get your order ready, and only so many pick-up times in any given day – but I expected all of that. A much bigger issue, at least for me, was the stock-outs…

The website has a number of products on it with an “out of stock” notation on them, but this does not appear to be tied into the individual store’s Inventory Control system, because almost a quarter of the items on my list were out of stock when I arrived, and the crew member processing the order offered me substitute products instead. Some of these were acceptable (I really don’t care what shape my French fries are in) but others weren’t (my wife will not go near anything cherry-flavored except actual cherries), and there were a number of items for which no practical substitute exists. And there was at least one case where I didn’t want the substitute product, but ended up getting it mixed in with my order (and having to pay for it) anyway…

Now, I’m not saying that going inside the store would have helped with any of these issues, particularly the stock-outs. There were a few items in my order that I haven’t seen on the shelf in weeks now, but I selected them anyway, since they weren’t marked at “out of stock” on the website, and it was always possible that they had some in the stockroom that hadn’t been put out yet. And there are some health and hygiene products I’m not going to trust someone to pick out for me anyway. But while I don’t believe the curbside service will ever completely replace going into the store and looking for things I might need, I can’t deny that there is a definite utility to not having to deal with quite so many stupid, annoying, entitled, or diseased people when I go to the store every week…