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Do Your Grocery Shopping Online
and Save Your Saturdays for Fun
With the dawn of the information age, the future has finally arrived: you can do your grocery shopping
online!
No more late-night grocery trips to avoid bringing the kids. No more Saturday mornings spent in long lines.
Grocery shopping online is one less stress, one less chore, one less errand.
I speak from experience. I place online grocery orders. In fact, in those early months after my infant Elena (my second) was born, I placed orders
every week.
In writing this page, I spent hours researching the largest 6 delivery services in the U.S.
If you want to know where these stores deliver, I've summarized their delivery areas here.
Grocery Shopping Online at Peapod
Peapod is one of the largest online grocery services in the nation. They've delivered over 10 million orders since their founding in 1989.
They have a widespread system
of warehouses and warerooms to ensure your produce is crisp, your milk is cold, and your meat is fresh.
Using my experience and the experiences of others, I've written a comprehensive review of their delivery service. If you are interested
in giving them a try, look through my review to see if it sounds like a good match for you.
Grocery Shop Online at Safeway
If the gold medal of frugal grocery shopping online goes to Peapod, Safeway would get the silver.
Besides having a larger delivery area,
they have proven to be a trustworthy (one mom said outstanding??) source of delivered groceries.
I've relied on surveyed and interviewed moms like you to fill in the blanks about Safeway's food quality,
service and prices.
Grocery Shop Online at Genuardi's
Genuardi's is a sister company to Vons (see below). However, they couldn't be more different. Genuardi's operates on the East Coast, focusing on the Greater
Phildelphia area and Washington DC. Vons is centered in California. The two companies are run differently, and so have different customer experiences.
Grocery Shopping Online at Vons
I do not recommend grocery shopping online at Vons grocery store. The mothers I interviewed ALL experienced massive problems with their
ordering. Here's a short summary about why I (and other moms) don't recommend this online grocery store:
- Poor quality of produce
- Late (or canceled) deliveries (one mom was up until 11pm!)
- Incomplete orders or inaccurate substitutions (lime juce for lemon juice)
- Misleading coupons ("Free delivery" was really a $5 credit off a $9.95 delivery charge)
- Poor customer service
Grocery Shop Online at MexGrocer
MexGrocer is the largest Hispanic grocery shopping online store in the nation. It offers nationwide delivery of authentic Mexican food, household
products, and religious goods. It also offers recipes and cookbooks for visitors. They specialize in having more than 1,500 hard-to-find items
of leading national Mexican food brands.
Naturally, MexGrocer is available for English and Spanish-speaking shoppers. Nearly 95% of the individuals I researched enjoyed their
experience and would shop via MexGrocer again. Perhaps the only negative is that they don't ship items on Saturday and Sunday. On the other hand,
they do ship (via UPS) to Alaska, Hawaii, Canada, and APO/FPO Military Bases.
If you're looking
for a Mexican product and can't find it in your local store, MexGrocer is a great fit for you.
Grocery Shop Online at Amazon
Not surprising, the super-store online giant, Amazon.com, has a pretty extensive grocery section.
You can purchase meat, dried fruit, coffee, toiletries, baby products, even dairy products. But if you're looking for a salad or fresh apples, you're out of luck.
They don't deliver fresh produce. Like MexGrocer above, it is a national delivery service.
They also have a "Subscribe and Save" program that saves you 15% by auto-shipping your groceries every 1, 2, 3, or 6 months. In this program,
all shipping is free, and email notices are sent out before shipment, letting you change or cancel if you need to (with no fees). There's nothing
like frugal grocery shopping online at Amazon!
If you've got a baby, grocery shopping online can save you a tremendous amount of stress, effort, and time.
I can think of a zillion things I'd rather
be doing with my infant instead of carting her down aisle after aisle, trying to distract her in the checkout line, and then lugging her and 20 bags
of groceries into the house.
I love grocery shopping online. It's such a great feeling going to bed at night and knowing that tomorrow, someone else will be doing my shopping!
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