This week winter hit our area, with bad roads and cold temperatures.
I also saw a huge uptick of COVID cases (likely Omicron spread by gatherings at Christmas and New Years).
Between one thing and another, when Mr. PiN announced we were out of eggs, I asked him if he would please arrange a grocery delivery instead of spending time battling traffic and tons of shoppers (who aren’t necessarily masking).
Since we haven’t really done this since the end of 2020, it was a somewhat different experience for us.
While, of course, any delivery service could have issues, we were prejudiced against Instacart, as our last order with the company (in 2020) just never came. (We reported this to Instacart and they did refund our money; though I note, we never did get our groceries).
We decided to go with a delivery from Whole Foods.
It was fun to go through the grocery list and deal with it from the comfort of our warm house. It was less fun getting a message that (a) Prime members now have to pay a delivery fee (that isn’t new, but we haven’t used the service since this changed) and (b) that there were no delivery times available.
New and improved: we had an offer to get a text if/when a delivery spot opened up. Also, as items went out of stock, Amazon didn’t delete them from our cart., which was super-annoying the last few times we had used them.
So, the next morning, when I checked on a delivery spot, we had everything we wanted in our cart. And we could arrange a delivery time.
Our groceries came on time, as advertised.
I did add up our costs for having our shopping delivered, rather than doing the work ourselves: $10 delivery fee, $12 tip, and then Mr. PiN offered the delivery person another cash tip as well. In all, we paid over $40 to enjoy staying home on a cold day and avoid exposure to lots of people.
Though we have money now, my former student self nearly had an aneurysm at the extra cost. I remember when $5 an hour was a big deal. To think of spending a day’s wages to avoid a chore made me feel kind of bad. I feel worse thinking about using money to avoid potential danger (COVID), and sticking someone else with the job.
On the other hand, we did provide income (and an excellent tip) to someone who wanted the work.
We saved Mr. PiN at least an hour of running errands–possibly more, considering the weekend scrum at most of our local markets. He may not earn a salary to compare hourly rates, but maybe his weekend time is worth about $40 an hour. It’s sometimes hard to make a judgement on this sort of thing.
Lastly, considering the petri dish of COVID our county has become, it’s possible we saved a lot more than $40. If nothing else, if he caught COVID and spread it to me, I would have to miss at least 5 days of work (and would lose more time out of my vacation time to make time to see the rescheduled patients).
I don’t think we will be ordering groceries this way all the time. But for one or two runs this month, this might be an excellent use of our money.
What do you think about grocery delivery services? Waste of money or a good investment?