When I lived close to a large grocery store, I had groceries delivered and it was heaven! It only took $5/order and saved me the insane stress that comes with grocery shopping (made much worse by a brain injury). The delivery was reliable and they almost always had exactly what I wanted.
After I moved, deliveries with that same chain were a solid 30 minutes to an hour late and almost always had to substitute. Additionally, it cost me more. Closer to $10/order. The other problem was that the timeslots available were not ideal and many days later. I wasn’t planning meals back then and it didn’t allow me to be flexible.
Instead, I started to make more frequent trips to the small grocer across the park from me. It was easy to just loop in there after a walk for an item or two. However, it wasn’t convenient to carry the full grocery shopping trip home. Soda is a big factor here.
So this week I checked out if this small grocer had a delivery option available, which it does. It uses a third party, however.
Grocery Shopping Online:
Based on my week plan minus what I had in stock, I added items to my cart. There aren’t a lot of details to the search criteria, but it’s a small store so there isn’t as much to search through either. Some of the foods were categorized a little strange, mostly meats. The store is also constantly changing brands they carry though they do typically have a very similar item. Even with my limitations, I can usually find something that is safe.
Since I’m already familiar with the store, many brands’ ingredients were already familiar. However, I had a hard time adding new things due to the lack of information on the platform. This was true with the larger chain grocer that I had delivered as well.
I ordered:
- 2 rotisserie chickens – yielded 7 cups of chicken meat
- 1 “grapes” – some sort of oz measurement that I screwed up!
- 2 rolls of sliced mozzarella – wasn’t what I thought either
- 1 package of a brand of lunch meat that was very hard to find on the site and I could only guess that it was the Nitrate-free version I needed
- 1 package of 6 hardboiled eggs
- 2 – 12 packs of soda cans
- 2 bags of BBQ Baked Lays – which they didn’t have so I cancelled via phone later
- 1 package baby spinach – which they substituted for larger spinach
- 1 small package of Basil – I thought it would be a bundle – oops
- 1 … 1/4 lb? fillet magnon – I wanted sirloin but couldn’t find it anywhere
- 1 package mixed crackers – I don’t find baked things to be very good at that grocery store
- 2 packs of fruit popsicles
- 1 pack of yogurt fruit popsicles
There were two substitutions and 1 dropped when they called the day before delivery.
Results:
The delivery was 30 minutes late, the meat was more grey than red, and the popsicles had melted juice onto the bottom of the box and one side is nearly juice water and all warped. Also, the grapes…
Am I the only person that buys grapes in bundles and doesn’t pay attention to how much the weight comes to at the checkout? Probably not. I didn’t want to overdo it, but this was basically 1 serving. Yikes!
On the plus side, it was much less of a burden to be able to add things to my cart over time and walk away. I actually did it over the course of a few days. I would argue that everyone finds grocery shopping in a store stressful unless it’s the only way to get out of crazy stress. Much of the stress to me is related to TBI, overwhelm from all the visual and sound input.
Additional stress comes from having to read ingredients so closely. The trend from these repeated experiments seems to be that I may not need to be looking for so many things. Removing BHT, nitrites, red food dyes, nightshade veggies, and soy may be the most important pieces (not in that order).
I think I will probably still use grocery delivery sometimes but hope that grocery shopping for myself will get easier as I become more familiar with meal planning. It’s a slow process but there’s no reason to think it won’t get easier with practice.
Pros and Cons:
The potential pros are time savings, ease of reordering. The cons are additional cost, deliveries may not be on time, and you can’t control how long and in what condition the food is transported. The service I’d used from the grocery store seemed to take better care of transporting cold items and had vehicles designed for it. These third-party services are a bit like allowing the pizza guy to deliver your milk…it might have been set right next to 7 hot pizza deliveries.