Acquiring Food During a Pandemic

[danbrotherston]

Third, I actually tried out instacart. It is certainly a functional service, I do indeed have groceries, but frankly, it's didn't impress. Instacard does not provide the shoppers any equipment of any sort for shopping, the result is, the person delivering my order needed me to come down and help him with the twenty some bags of groceries, because apparently to instacart, providing a CART would be too much overhead for them to incur in logistics. But more generally, the "personal shopping" experience is just not something I enjoy or find valuable in anyway. I suspect some people disagree, but to me, it's a negative, and the concept of fulfilling a delivery order from grocery stores is just stupid in general, it would be far more efficient (read: cheaper, or, you could pay people a reasonable wage instead) to fulfill orders from a fulfillment centre designed for it.

Regardless, there is plenty more pandemic to try out all the different options we have available.

I've long dreamed of a fulfillment center based delivery service, or even pickup service if it was actually close by (I hate shopping in supermarkets even without a pandemic). Having to keep an eye on my phone for ~1 hour while an Instacart shopper asks me about replacements for out of stock items is annoying, but I still find it the most practical way of getting groceries downtown. I have found during the pandemic that all kinds of delivery (not just Instacart) are much more willing to come up to my unit to drop deliveries at my door. I think a large part of this is the lack of traffic making it easier for them to stop for a couple minutes. I do feel bad about having them carry so many bags up, but I try to tip generously.

Above all though, I'd love to see more practical grocers downtown (this seems like heaven to me https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kYHTzqHIngk). I've tried to use just about every option (Legacy Greens, Fore Quarter, Shoppers, New City, farmers market, J&P when it existed), but between limited selection, higher prices, or the inconvenient distances to walk between some of these stores, getting groceries is probably the least convenient part of living downtown.

For anyone interested, these are all the delivery services I've come across locally (although I'm yet to try anything other than Instacart so far):

https://www.grocerygateway.com/store/
https://getbutter.ca/ (Has an invalid cert at the time of posting, hopefully it hasn't shut down already)
https://producedeliverykw.company.site/
https://hellamaid.ca/grocery-delivery/
https://waterloo.mrsgrocery.com/ (Very interested in trying this one)
https://www.zerocery.ca/
https://www.instacart.ca/store

I've also ordered (free) delivery from good vibes a couple times: https://www.goodvibesjuice.com/

Getbutter has indeed shut down, before they were erroring out, they had a shutdown message.

The hellamaid people were quite interesting.

Zerocerie was interesting sounding too, but a lot of those are quite high priced, more so than any of the local stores in DTK.

Outside of the pandemic, I certainly agree that groceries in dtk appears to be a challenge since we don't have a traditional supermarket, but since I've lived here, I haven't found it pretty reasonable to meet all my grocery needs and wants. The market has almost everything I need, but only Saturdays, the other smaller shops meet most of my needs, if I'm willing to make multiple stops (which combined still take less time than going to costco, and I'm able to pay higher prices--part of that is not needing to own a car because I live downtown) but if I'm shopping between market days, usually I only need one or two things, so probably just one stop.  And when I really need a full supermarket, I'll either take the LRT to Valumart in uptown or I'll bike on the trail to Sobeys/Food Basics.

I certainly wouldn't object to a supermarket, but after living here a while, I'm surprised how little of an obstacle it has been not having a supermarket, and I do think we would lose a lot of the smaller businesses if we did get a supermarket.