Acquiring Food During a Pandemic

[panamaniac]

I ordered from Instacart twice in March. My first experience, which was during the week of March 20, was fantastic. The shopper was on point, everything arrived great and I was super impressed.

My second experience, the following week, was worse but not terrible. In the second trip, the frozen goods I had ordered were scattered throughout all the bags and everything had thawed. That's in large part because of the lines that were at the store at the time I think, the last item was shopped and something like 30 minutes passed before it was noted that they were on their way. I contacted Instacart and they compensated me for the lost items. 

In both cases the quality of the produce was adequate or great, but if you're picky about it I might be wary. I definitely won't order frozen items for delivery again, at least until there are better systems for dealing with wait times or until it's okay for delivery services to bring insulated containers into stores or something.

I haven't ordered delivery from Instacart again, mostly because the order times stretched out to over a week. Some folks need deliveries, but my partner or I can pretty easily get to groceries in the day time anyway which we've been doing since. We're very close to a grocery store so it is relatively easy to pop over and decide whether or not to go in based on the lines.

Tuesdays at 9:30am have worked well for us the past few weeks at Laurentian Zehrs as well as the Food Basics and Dollarama on Fairway. As a broad rule, we aim to get out for supplies in windows between 9 and 11 in the morning or 1:30 to 3:30 in the afternoon on Tuesdays, Wednesdays or Thursdays.

We also did a large curbside pickup order from Stemmler's a couple of weeks back. That order was placed online and we were given a pickup time a few days later. It was a Saturday afternoon and there was a line outside the store at the time (with physical distancing being respected) but we did the standard curtsied flow of park, call with our spot number, and the food went directly into the back of our van. We stopped for maple syrup at our preferred farm on the way home, too.

I'm also hopeful for spring crops, and plan on roaming out on my bike perhaps to find some roadside stalls.

I don't have a car, so I'm really not sure how a curbside pickup order would work from these places, I've also noticed some of them will not delivery to multi-residential buildings. It's kind of put me off those options.

Biking to roadside stalls is a great idea, I did at one point locate the OK Egg farm, but I'm not sure if they would have a roadside stall. The one weakness of this is the likely need for cash.

I will probably try instacart at some point, the frozen foods tip is a good one, but that is too bad, since frozen veggies is how I've avoided shopping for a month. I've noticed delivery slots are more available now, so perhaps things are getting more settled.

 You usually have to call the shop when you arrive for "curbside pickup", so I doubt it's relevant whether you arrive in a vehicle or not.