We always found the food to be very high quality. Maybe something changed?
Dunno. Some of the produce is better than my local (lousy, upper Manhattan) supermarket, but some is oddly worse.
Soon the FreshDirect truck will be replaced by legions of drones buzzing overhead as they whisk their packages to their destinations. The food will still suck, but it will get to you faster and with more whirly noises.
Hard to see myself using this. Don't you carefully examine each piece of fruit and produce at the market before choosing the ones you want? Probably not, you weirdly unneurotic weirdo.
I've never heard of FreshDirect, but if it's anything like Schwans, I always thought that food was oddly terrible, although I haven't knowingly had any in 25 years, so maybe it's better these days.
Assuming Fresh Direct is like the similar services over here, I can't bring myself to give up the freedom of choice for a minor gain in convenience. I walk past four ordinary supermarkets and a Vietnamese supermarket on my way to and from work, and there's a big posh supermarket 10 minutes walk along the riverbank. And there are foodie markets one commuter train stop away. Shopping for food is not a hassle.
I do do the subscription beer thing, though, because I like to try new ones and they're heavy to carry from the shops.
I used Peapod for a while, in the Boston area about 15 years ago. I guess I was an early-ish adopter at the time, but didn't stick with it. I remember the food being... mediocre? But better at the time than the trouble of shopping. Doubt we'd try it again today short of an emergency though.
4 is my reason for not using this sort of service. I inspect the fruit, veggies, and meat I buy carefully before purchasing. Perhaps something could be set up with robots and webcams so people could inspect their produce before buying it.
We used PeaPod maybe twice when we moved to this place (at our last place, with the grocery store less than two blocks away, it just wasn't plausibly justifiable). Turns out that walking a mile or so to the grocery store on the weekend is still more convenient and pleasurable. We were tempted once or twice this winter, but never quite pulled the trigger.
Most of the UK supermarket chains do online deliveries. We occasionally get groceries delivered, but generally it's just as convenient to go and get it, and I like choosing the best veg/fruit. What is handy, is that our preferred chain has little scanners you can check out on the way in, and scan and bag your groceries as you go. No checkouts. No waiting. It's a life-saver with a grumpy toddler.
I heard they were moving their distribution center from Queens to the Bronx. Maybe you are getting stuff from the new distribution center in the Bronx, and they haven't ironed out the kinks yet?
I was always quite happy with the produce. It was like it had been hand selected, which always made me wonder what happened to all the produce that did not get selected. Maybe they send it to your neighborhood.
We could put a zip line out our living room window to Whole Foods and it would take 10 seconds to get there. As it is, it takes three minutes. So the only advantage of Fresh Direct is that it doesn't sell homeopathic woo and its shitty labor practices have not yet been googled by us, by us. Well by me anyway.
is that our preferred chain has little scanners you can check out on the way in, and scan and bag your groceries as you go. No checkouts. No waiting. It's a life-saver with a grumpy toddler.
I don't even have a toddler (so instead I whine/act grumpy), and I hate when I have to do without that service.
It's funny, I don't like the idea of other people choosing my produce from the grocery store, but I'm fine with getting a farm box. I suppose it is because they are specialists.
Count me in as well with people who find grocery shopping fun rather than a chore; I know it's not the case for everyone.
Like if I sit up 20 degrees from my current position reclining on the couch where I relocate at 6 am when Her Majesty the Kitty demands it, I can see the Whole Foods sign.
I walk past four ordinary supermarkets and a Vietnamese supermarket on my way to and from work, and there's a big posh supermarket 10 minutes walk along the riverbank.
*wistful sigh*
What is handy, is that our preferred chain has little scanners you can check out on the way in, and scan and bag your groceries as you go.
Speaking of, the self checkouts at the Little Waitrose near my new office are absurdly over-engineered. They don't have a coin slot, they have a conveyor belt on which you drop your coins. They don't have a note reader. They have what looks like a reverse cash machine slot where you put your note horizontally, it senses the disruption of the light beam, then it clamps shut and swallows the note.
Don't know anything about their meat, but I always really liked Fresh Direct. Too many fucking boxes to break down, but they got recycled. The produce and the coffee were always very good.
5: Isn't Schwann's stuff all frozen?
little scanners you can check out on the way in
They did this at our local market when they upgraded to compete with WF, but they took them out again after a year or two. I didn't find them especially convenient, tbh.
We have, within 1 mile, a WF, a wannabe Wegman's*, Aldi, TJ's, a crummy Giant Eagle, and a Target with food. And they're putting in a second Aldi in a slightly different direction because Aldi bought out that chain. But I buy 90% of my groceries in the Strip; I really only ever use the first 2 on that list. Aldi and TJ's are IMHO hopelessly overrated.
*the aforementioned place, part of Giant Eagle
urns out that walking a mile or so to the grocery store on the weekend is still more convenient and pleasurable.
Yeah, the walk to the grocery store is convenient and pleasurable.
I always thought FreshDirect produce was pretty reasonable compared to the average supermarket, but nowhere near greenmarket/co-op/fancy supermarket territory.
Not being able to inspect the produce is acceptable once you realize you have no idea what you are doing. They won't send you something that obviously bruised, moldy or wormy.
What I found is that fiddling with a web UI to click "add to cart" on exactly N bananas isn't wonderfully more convenient from just going to the shop and throwing a bunch of bananas in my cart.
As far as the environmental impact, the packaging used to be much, much worse (inefficiently packed boxes, tons of plastic wrap). I think the official line is that it's better to have a big, well-utilized truck swing by your place on its route than have you drive your private car to the supermarket, but this utterly fails to grapple with the reality of Manhattan grocery shopping. LB, were you previously lugging it home yourself (or forcing your kids to)?
13.2: Same boat here; I love picking up my CSA veggie box from the drop off at the dance studio.
I, unfortunately, am not one of the people who enjoys grocery shopping. I do keep an eye out for inexpensive meats, etc., especially given the last few years' rise in all beef prices.
Oh, lugging (nine times out of ten or more -- very occasionally Buck will fill the car with groceries, but it's not our norm). I'm just hoping that it's at least no worse: I would bet that the FD truck empties itself in a five or six block area in my neighborhood, so it might as well have been delivering to a grocery store, if you see what I mean.
We use Amazon Fresh, which is pretty great. Their standard stuff is good, including the produce, and if you're willing to wait more than a few hours for delivery they have deals with super fancy butchers and specialty shops to bring you super high end stuff. It hasn't totally replaced going to the supermarket/butcher, my wife likes to go every two weeks or so, and we also get a farm box but it's great (especially with kids) to look in the fridge at 9pm and be like oh shit no eggs and diapers and then by 5 the next morning there are eggs and diapers.
Forgot Amazon Fresh existed -- maybe I'll give it a try.
Yeah, the walk to the grocery store is convenient and pleasurable.
Right now we've still got a kid in a stroller with an absurdly large basket. We'll have to do something else (one of those old lady carts?) when she grows out of it.
28: To prepare for a life of cold toilet seats.
How often do city-walkers have to visit the grocery store? We make one trip every Saturday and buy about $200 worth of groceries.
It's definitely a mega-Texas-sized grocery store, which is great in some ways, but means that you cannot quickly dart in and out for something. So swinging by more than once a week is prohibitively annoying, at least during the school year. If I had a cute little bodega down the street, I think I'd be more inclined to stop more often.
Average size of a grocery store is about 46K square feet, average size of a regular HEB (not HEB Plus, which is more like a Walmart) seems to be about 78K square feet.
I get 80-90% of our food/household items delivered atm, usually from Sainsbury. Hate driving to do a big shop (and for 6 people, any shop is a fair size). Although actually our walk-five-minutes-round-the-corner Lidl is about to reopen after over 4 months, so that figure will probably come down again.
I've got to go somewhere on walks with the baby, so we probably get food from the co-op every other day. The nanny does the same, so I'm often trying to come up with one or two items that we need to justify the destination. Sometimes the baby ends up at the co-op (and the coffee shop near it) two or three times in a day.
Next week my life gets way easier, when two weekday farmers' markets open in parks on my one mile trip to work.
31: With two people shopping and carrying, we're at the limit for walking (or taking Metro) to the store once a week. Honestly, though, we drive the one stop to Whole Foods because (a) there's frequent trackwork on the weekends and (b) trains run every 15 min or so even without track work, which is hard to time. It is handy if I forget something or want something very perishable midweek, though. Easy to run over to the store for one ingredient.
As I said, I do most of my shopping in the Strip, usually combined with a stop at the regular grocery (since I already have the car, this is my chance to buy heavy shit; most weeks, I'm only buying a half dozen things). But during the week, I usually walk to a store 2-3 times for a staple, or something baked, or whatever. Between kids, the dog, and the wine store, it's not remotely burdensome.
We do have a granny cart (came with the house), but don't use it much. Every once in awhile a shopping trip unexpectedly expands (flour's on sale!) and I end up lugging home 20 lbs of stuff, but whatever. Most of the time in the Strip, I'm parked at one end or the other, such that I walk half a mile to the most distant store and make my way back, loading up all along; those loads are almost always 20+ lbs (I do usually have kids with, although they don't/can't carry much yet)
Next week my life gets way easier, when two weekday farmers' markets open in parks on my one mile trip to work.
The farmer's market that's damn near visible from my house is on Mondays, meaning it's 2 days after I've bought the week's produce, and the day after I've done most of the week's cooking. I've managed to work it somewhat into my schedule, but it's frustratingly useless.
We buy 150-200 at Costco each week plus 50-100 at Trader Joes. The latter is walkable or bikeable but we usually drive anyway.
That's somewhat lower than our actual weekly food costs because every 6 months or so we do a big batch cooking with several hundred dollars of ingredients. I guess spread out its not that much more per week.
How often do city-walkers have to visit the grocery store? We make one trip every Saturday and buy about $200 worth of groceries.
Once a week, usually, with a midweek stop off at the cornershop or whatever for milk, juice and/or booze.
No surprise, we're unusually disorganized. We're probably at a grocery store upwards of four times a week, weeks we're not getting things delivered.
Yeah, the big market with the good mushrooms is Sunday morning, so I'll go to that until the summer-only crowds get too big. Then the Tuesday markets on my commute aren't so useful. But it is real nice to know I can get produce I like even if I go out of town for the weekend.
Average size of a grocery store is about 46K square feet, average size of a regular HEB (not HEB Plus, which is more like a Walmart) seems to be about 78K square feet.
The local co-op where I do most of my shopping is 15K, and is a convenient walk. I probably go 5 time a week, some of which are just, "it's a nice evening, I'd like to go for a walk anyway, might as well go to the store and get 1-2 things and see if there's anything else I want while I'm there."
We generally do a big grocery store trip once a week, by foot. We also get a meat share once a month (ca. 5 lbs of meat, not all of it directly edible) from our nearby butcher and we stop in there up to a couple times a week to pick things up. We usually get milk from the corner store, and occasionally other staples there too. Sometimes we get meat from the Brazilian butcher shop that is in the non-work/daycare direction from our house. We order our coffee online from Pawtucket. Rye and high-gluten flours online. A car trip to Trader Joe's to stock up on wine and frozen stuff ideally once a month, but usually less often.
43: plus occassional stops at the other butcher shop, and trips to the farmer's market when there's a weekly one near our house.
Oh, right. How quickly I forget! (It runs through March.)
You didn't ask how often we go to the liquor store.
||
I am either being overwhelmed with despair at the human condition or coming down with a cold. Any advice on how to tell the difference?
|>
Our weekly shopping expedition is usually by car, which feels like a copout of the urban lifestyle ("But we don't drive all week!" I tell myself). Usually just that one grocery store trip, to one of a rotating cast of stores, which I supplement with stops to the WF or the H-Mart on my commute home. My wife stops at the farmer's market near her office during the season, twice a week. And now there's a real grocery store directly on her commute home as well, which might change things.
Also, yeah, ~monthly Trader Joe's trips for cheap wine and frozen stuff.
46: The despair is actually constant, you're just able to forget about it for a while when you're enjoying the temporary illusion of good health.
Both make me want to pick my nose.
50 is what I think of premenstrual rage, too.
On the other hand, my rose-tree, which now makes a dome about twelve feet in diameter, is in full bloom and the whole damp garden smells like roses and fresh earth and the neighbor's lilac. Pippa may have just gone down the street.
Farmers market or farm box for produce, but then it's a year round option here. Also multiple markets a week are available and convenient. Dry goods from a grocery collective (rainbow), bread from the bakery, meat from the butcher, cheese from the cheesemonger, wine from the wine store - an absurd amount of the better half's time goes to food procurement but then he works it efficiently into other things and it's all intertwined with our social life etc so it's just life to us.
Sometimes, when you have a cold, they say you shouldn't come to class, because you don't want to spread the disease. Not sure if this applies to despair at the human condition.
I'm now finding Ama/zon Pan/try a good complement to living car-free since it gets me the heavy stuff I hate to lug - detergent, soda water, etc.
We have a year-round farmer's market, but it's shitty the whole year round.
We have winter markets but they're mostly not food- craft stuff like scarves, candles, baskets.
Every now and then I buy 40-lb boxes of cat litter on Amazon and feel like I'm perceptibly shortening the UPS guy's life.
JRoth prefers MD to TJ? That's crazy talk! Sure there's more selection but the prices and quality are really different. I guess it depends on what you are shopping for. We go to both. I want a Wegmans darn it...
I have never found a single thing in TJ's that made me think, "I need to have this." Aside from not having wine, ours may be a small one, but it's 75% prepared foods, and we simply don't use any of those. I just walk through the aisles and think, "Nope, nope, nope...." Sometimes they have decent prices on produce or something, but it's just not remotely compelling to me, especially being farther away via a less pleasant walk.
And it's not just proximity: Aldi is (slightly) closer, but I gave it a fair shot (I looked at the flyers every week and went in at least once a month for a year after they opened), and once again: no.
A big part of it is that what I'm getting from MD is a really short list: salt, flour (specific brand), OJ (one of 2 specific brands), canned beans, tomato products, soda (specific sizes of specific brands)... there's very very little that could plausibly be substituted, especially since I really don't want/need the hassle of finding out whether TJ OJ is as good* as Tropicana (which I only buy when it's on sale anyway, so it's not like TJ saves me $$; indeed, there are trips to MD where every single item I buy is either on sale or with a coupon, and they're all genuine need items, not "well, since it's on sale...").
*also being sure, of course, that the kids are on board. My kids who complain about all the Jif I bought when it was on sale, because they prefer Giant Eagle brand.
TJ's used to be the only place with those peanut-butter-filled pretzel bites. Now those are everywhere, so the only special things at TJ's are the dried fruit.
Aside from not having wine
Ok see right there is the problem. Except for the wine Trader Joe's is basically an upscale SWPL convenience store.
61: Do the other places have chocolate covered peanut-butter-filled pretzels?
"I just walk through the aisles and think, "Nope, nope, nope....""
This is the dairy queen household on vacation, trying to buy food in Friday Harbor!
Closest grocery store to us is Costco, and they're getting ready to build a new store much closer. We resisted for quite a while, but have assimilated.
We just started getting milk and eggs to our porch from a local dairy and its really good milk. Not as good as I remember hay-on-wye milk, but as good as anything else pasteurized I've ever had.
I would like a CSA box but the dwarf lord has enough allergies that we'd have trouble eating everything, which would be sad.
I usually drive and do a shop once a week, or so. Sometimes I take xelA, which is fine if I can get round quickly with just a few bribes for him. But I'll pick up milk/bread/booze/coffee in between, which I'll just do on the way to and from work. My wife basically doesn't do food shopping of any kind except, under sufferance, getting milk for xelA if we've run out. Which is why she thinks we spend far too much, and I think that it's a miracle of clever shopping on my part, that we spend so little.
43: Blume, what's the name if the Pawtucket coffee place. We get ours at Trader Joe's, but I wouldn't mind being able to order it online.
Chicago has seen the explosion of grocery choices. Long dominated by 2 large local chains, Jewel and Dominick's, independent local chains and stores serving a more diverse set of tastes, both ethnic and culturally chosen such as foodies, have been coming on strong. Then Dominick's, mismanaged by Safeway, went out of business last year, vacating about a hundred stores across the area, near every neighborhood. The local chains stepped up, and took over those stores.
From where I live, near Devon & Western there are now a dozen large grocery stories reasonably nearby, competing on price, quality and variety.
The last time I was in my girlfriend's current city we went to Wegman's and it's bizarre. It seems orders of magnitude nicer than literally every other thing in the entire city.
I stop at either the grocery, CVS, or the little meat market down the street just about every day because I'm bad at being organized enough to buy what I need all at once, and I just like having excuses to go out and walk around a bit.
Blume, what's the name if the Pawtucket coffee place.
New Harvest. They have it at lots of Whole Foods stores around here too, but tend to only carry the dark roasts. Their single origin light roasts are great.
I order from FreshDirect maybe twice a year or so. Used to order regularly (when we lived in Queens). I've always found their produce to be quite good (but I'm a weirdly unneurotic weirdo about fruits and veg), but overall a bit pricey. And it's really easy to spend more than you meant to, because the website makes it all look and sound so good, and pushes so many food-aspirational buttons. It does save a lot of time, though, to have groceries delivered to your door.
Re: their labor practices, I have heard (but cannot confirm) that they do hire people with criminal records -- which would be a good thing, imo, but again, I cannot confirm. No doubt they treat their workers as shabbily as the competition.
It seems orders of magnitude nicer than literally every other thinggrocery in the entire citycountry.
It's been 15 years since I was first in a Wegman's, and I've still never been in a nicer/better grocery (although I haven't been in a Publix since the '80s; they were awesome then, and reputed to have only gotten better).
Wegman's opened here. We go regularly. We get our produce and deli meats at an independent green grocer, Russo's. I also buy my better--Somerdale English--there.
I think that Wegman's organic produce is nicer than what they sell at Whole Foods.
||
I need help finding some kind of organizing app.
Not exactly a to-do list. I jot things down on workflowy which I like as a brain dump. I make lots of lists in Wunderlist. I use google calendar.
Let's say that I have 5 personal tasks, and X number of work tasks.
How do I plan out when to call the florist (and how much time filling out her form will take), when to go grocery shopping, when to start dinner, which e-mails to send etc.? When to get the drycleaning, etc.
Has anyone used 24me? Would it be useful for this purpose? Reqall sounded good, but I think that it was discontinued.
Are there other apps that people have liked for this kind of thing?
|>
So, Amazon Fresh has just started operating in my neighbourhood, and while most of it isn't much different from Ocado or whatever, they do have most of the larger scale outfits at Borough Market, including my favourite cheese- and saucisson-monger which is pretty great. It's generally only a limited selection, but it sure beats braving the crowds on a weekend.