I do most the cooking in my house, and the majority of it is meat and produce. I can say from years of experience that it's easy to grab a bad apple if you aren't paying attention or know about food quality, and from the grocery pickers I've seen, they aren't and don't.
A guitarist doesn't just buy some random guitar from amazon - they see it in person and play it. If you cook and care about your food, using a food service just isn't something you'll want to do.
This. Actually, I would buy a cheap guitar (but not from Amazon), say $400-500, for a purpose like having one to place when visiting relatives at Christmas. But I wouldn't buy a nice guitar without inspecting and playing it.
Online retailers UIs are all extremely bad for browsing. One would imagine they would be better, because they can reorganize any way they want, without any limitation, personalize it to each customer, and have several different organizations at the same time available for people to pick what's best each time.
My grocery store's website (Jewel-Osco) doesn't even work on Firefox; searching for anything just gives me a loading screen that never goes away, even on a brand new profile with all cookies accepted and no adblocker or other extensions. On Chrome it works, but it's comically slow, and the mobile app is somehow even worse.
The really confusing part is the parent company's website (Albertsons) works just fine, though it is also slow.
Kudos for all the "smart" managers that throw direct sales away so they can spy on the more price-sensitive people that endure a bad experience in exchange for discounts or not owning a car.
It happens on so many kinds of store, it's baffling.
Food is what we're made of it and the buying, cooking, eating of it provides a lot of the structure of our lives. I'm skeptical of a view that would have us be even further alienated from these activities.
Shopping for food is important to me because food is important to me, and I have no desire to change this despite how "inefficient" it may be. This attitude has already very nearly optimized out most of the texture of daily life to no benefit that is apparent to me.
I can pick my groceries faster and with less aggravation than I can navigate the online ordering UI's dark patterns and attempts to get me to "engage".
I'd imagine most people aren't 100% positive on what they want to get beforehand. Sometimes you only realize you want something after passing by it. Maybe it's something you haven't gotten in awhile and hadn't considered beforehand.
And even if you are completely sure on what you want in advance, having someone else do it is not always great. At least with Instacart, the person doing the shopping frequently didn't know where something was and just assumed it was 'out' and tried to substitute it (badly). There was all this awful delay and back-and-forth and crappy picures with the person shopping to try to get the right thing.
Doing it yourself doesn't have that problem. You know what you want, why you want it, and what you're willing to bend on. No, X brand cheese is not a substitute for Y branch I wanted, never do that. But yes, Z brand and type of milk is fine compared to what I wanted and I know they are frequently out.
Grocery store employees aren't any better at this, btw. Especially since the stores like to re-arrange on a monthly basis.
I worked at a food store as a student a long time ago.
Remarkably few customers are weekly. We did sell entire cartloads of food on certain days at certain times but it's pretty rare.
Most of the people walking in will have to skip a meal that day if they did not stop at the store for just one thing. Then add some impulse purchases. Most people walk out with one grocery bag, some walk out with only one item.
Where I lived, most of this behavior was poor planning not financial. Most of the items were pretty nice, not the cheapest.
People who can't plan ahead to have enough eggs or whatever will never plan ahead enough for the enormous latency of very slow delivery. Those eggs they're buying, will be cooking mere minutes after purchase not hours.
They go in to see, hear, and smell good things. They experience some products first-hand in a way that shows whether they're as advertised or not. They also know what's out of stock with many, immediate substitution options. There's also more coupon, markdown, or haggling opportunities for those who want them.
Finally, walking into stores lets you connect to people. Those who repent and follow Jesus Christ are told to share His Gospel with strangers so they can be forgiven and have eternal life. We're also to be good to them in general, listening and helping, from the short person reaching for items too high to the cashier that needs a friendly word.
We, along with non-believers, also get opportunities out of this when God makes us bump into the right people at the right time. They may become spouses, friends, or business partners. It's often called networking. However, Christians are to keep in mind God's sovereign control of every detail. Many are one-time or temporary events or observations just meant to make our lives more interesting.
Most of the above isn't available in online ordering which filters almost all of the human experience down to a narrow, efficient process a cheap AI could likely do. That process usually has no impact on eternity for anyone. Further, it has less impact on other people. Then, I have less of the experiences God designed us to have. Which includes the bad ones that build our character, like patience and forgiveness.
So, while I prefer online shopping, I try to pray God motivate me to shop in stores at times and do His will in there. Many interestings things, including impacts on people, continue to happen. Some events hit the person so hard that, even as a non-believer, they know God was behind it. I'm grateful for these stores that provide these opportunities to us.
We have done grocery pickup for years but the pickup lanes are almost always empty while dozens of shoppers walk into the store.
To me, shopping for groceries by hand is a waste of time but it clearly has some utility for a lot of people.
I wonder if that inertia is making traditional grocery shopping stickier than it should be and disincentivizing optimization.
I hope consumer tastes will change because there’s no reason for us to all walk into a giant warehouse every week.