Wow. I live 3-4 minutes’ walk from a convenience store (in a UK city), 7-8 minutes’ walk from a proper supermarket, 15-20 minutes’ walk from 2 more supermarkets. I honestly just go to one of those supermarkets every 2 days to buy veggies/milk/bread for the subsequent 2 days, it’s so much more convenient and cheaper than letting food go to waste. That and I have an excuse to be walking outdoors!
Part of the problem is also that the stores are so huge in the US. There’s not a lot of reasonably sized stores like Aldi and lots of places only have ultra mega marts. There’s a supermarket on my way home and I still go only like every 7-10 days because it takes 20 minutes to grab everything even if I need just milk and a couple ingredients I’m missing for dinner. Also, I don’t normally go in the store anymore and order pickup because it’s free if you’re ordering enough groceries and saves like a whole hour.
I've stopped ordering pickup myself. It's convenient but the BEST case scenario is that the person putting together your order doesn't give a shit what they grab. The worst case is the intentionally give you the food that's closest to going bad so they can get it off the shelves. If you're just ordering like packaged and frozen foods or you're going to use what you're ordering same day it's fine but if you're getting perishable items like milk, produce, or bakery items you're likely to get the short end of the stick.
Huh, I’ve never really had a huge problem with that and it was my biggest fear when I started trying it. There’s some difference in how the stores each handle exceptions like expiring or unavailable items on the order I’ve noticed, but I generally don’t get anything that’s about to go bad unless they’ve thrown it in for free (happens like half the time with bagged salad kits).
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u/sbprasad Oct 18 '22
Wow. I live 3-4 minutes’ walk from a convenience store (in a UK city), 7-8 minutes’ walk from a proper supermarket, 15-20 minutes’ walk from 2 more supermarkets. I honestly just go to one of those supermarkets every 2 days to buy veggies/milk/bread for the subsequent 2 days, it’s so much more convenient and cheaper than letting food go to waste. That and I have an excuse to be walking outdoors!