My far north Austin suburb has Instacart, Shipt, Randalls, Walmart and other eCommerce grocery options now, so I'm seeing a whole lot more “virtual shoppers” in the aisles.
I even saw an army of H-E-B Curbside shoppers out in force on the Friday before Hurricane Harvey's rain bands started hitting Austin. That seems both smart and devious, on the shopper's part. Avoid the crowds, for sure, but the poor kids picking the orders had to deal with a million substitutions because of rampant out of stocks.
If you really want to get a good look at how digital grocery shopping has grown, hit up an H-E-B within the Austin city limits at noon on a Monday. Honestly, there were more digital shoppers than actual shopper. I've never seen this many out at the same time before.
This fun blog post from Bon Appetit came across my news alerts this morning, and it gives an inside view of what it's like to shop for digital orders. (and if you want some training refreshers, the 10-Minute Merchandiser has five tips for online order fulfillment)
The author, Alyse Whitney, did an Instacart shift at Fairway in Manhattan.
Produce seems to be the biggest hassle. Sorry, Alyse!
From the post:
The worst part of shopping is dealing with produce. When you select a quantity of a fruit or vegetable, like one watermelon, the app converts it to an approximate weight and charges you accordingly. Since a watermelon doesn't have a sticker with its weight on it—a lady never tells!—I had to pick them up one at a time and try to figure out which one was 15 lbs. And then to check if I was correct, I had to run across the store to the only scale in the produce department, hoist it almost above my head because I'm 5'1", and pray I was accurate. I wasn't. So I had to override the weight in the app, which actually charged the customer less than they paid.
That was one time. Imagine doing that for 15 items of produce. I did that, and discovered that ¼ lb. of mushrooms is four mushrooms.
A veteran Instacarter named Mo noticed me struggling throughout my shift and offered a few tips: Don't bag your produce until you're at the register, weigh all and your produce at the same time to avoid running back and forth, multitask by parking your cart and grabbing a bunch of things at once. My biggest takeaway was to never bag produce. Ever. It's a waste of plastic and time, even if four mushrooms rolling around the cart might drive me insane.
If you want to see the rest of her adventure, head over to Bon Appetit.