Apparently people who like grocery shopping exist. I am not one of them. I didn't enjoy the lines, label-reading, or lifting even before I had a child; now, going to the store is a race to see who will lose it first, my toddler or me, the mom desperately turning all the cucumbers over before the produce man sees the teeth marks.
This is all to say that I was delighted to discover that the Greater Seattle area now has three grocery delivery services. (A fourth service, San Francisco's Webvan.com, is planning to expand into this area soon.) Despite my rather extreme aversion to the Internet, I recently took all three for a trial run, with varying results.
Where's the "register here" button? Not on the home page—a problem that left this new customer scratching her head. Note to Joe: People come to this Web site to shop. Make it easy for them.
Just like with the other shopping services, you can order for delivery the next day, seven days a week, within 90-minute delivery windows. Albertsons also gives you the option of picking up your order. Delivery is free for orders of $60 or more; $5.95 if the tab is under $60. Frankly, I spent most of my time at Albertsons.com confused and frustrated. The thing kept asking me if I wanted a new list, and I had no idea what it meant. Shopping list? List of what was already in my cart? WHAT LIST? Plus, it took me ages to find "How to Shop." Another note to Joe: Why not post a "How to Use This Web Site" page right up front?
I need bananas. I type in "fruit" and up pops Arbor Mist Wine Exotic Fruits White Zinfandel, Scooby Doo Fruit Snacks, Tropical Fruit Punch Shampoo—but no bananas. Where's the fresh fruit? Back to the home page; OK, there's "shop by department." Aha! "Produce!" I'm delighted to find them billed as "green bananas," which is my favorite way to buy them, but it asks me how many I want. Would that be how many bunches, or how many individual bananas? Oh, dear. I order one.
I also need Kleenex—where do I go for that? Personal Care? Household? When I find it I realize I don't know my favorite Kleenex by name, I know it by sight. I schlep over to my Kleenex box and find it's called Kleenex Facial Tissue Family Size, Yellow. Brilliant! Here it is on-screen—but only in blue. That's another problem of current online grocers—a more limited range of stock than you'll find in the store.
I was never quite sure whether I was adding items to my shopping cart or to my list, so I felt compelled to call up my shopping cart after every purchase to make sure. This added significantly to the time it took to shop; can't they figure out a way to keep my running tab going along the side of the page?
Not until the end did I spy the "featured food of the month," a rather didactic little essay on cranberries. (Again, Joe, people are here to shop.) This reminded me that I needed some, but when I did a search I discovered that Albertsons.com did not carry cranberries. Hello?
On to "checkout." I chose my delivery time to coincide with my daughter's afternoon nap and requested in the "special instructions" field for the deliverer not to ring the doorbell. Damned if the nice delivery man didn't come at 9:15am and ring away. He apologized profusely when alerted to his mistake, and I was mollified when he brought the bags directly to my kitchen. Then I saw the produce—flawlessly fresh, from the heartbreakingly ripe honeydew melon to the firm, hydroponic tomatoes.
Fresh produce, much more perfect than I would have picked out for myself, was almost enough to compensate for the Kleenex, which turned out to be neither yellow nor blue, but pink. Pink.
This site's opening page declared that Northwestgrocer.com delivers from Bellingham to Chehalis (specifying cities like Morton, Sedro Woolley, Fife, and the thriving metropolis of Mossyrock, along with many others), with no mention of, um, Seattle. I would have suffered serious confusion and bailed, but at 10pm my Web-geek husband who needed to know e-mailed the company. At midnight Northwestgrocer.com's CEO, David Sukola, e-mailed back. "Sure, we'll deliver to you," he wrote, as if he weren't the CEO of a company e-mailing some random customer at midnight but a neighbor doing a favor. His service, the cheapest of the three, was free for orders over $50; $5 for orders less than that.
And his page was laid out better than Albertsons.com's. There, in a frame along the left side, ran the list of shopping departments, making it painless to dart among virtual aisles; up top ran a notice every time you added something to your shopping cart. Nice.
Northwestgrocer.com has a few big problems, however. Unlike with the other two services, shoppers cannot click on item names to call up label information about them. Worse, shoppers who ought to be able to locate items either by searching or browsing are often shut out on the latter; crackers and cookies are sold on the site, but available under none of the department listings, including "packaged foods." So the shopper must do a search for "crackers," which yields all of four choices. If you want something besides Ritz, Cheese Nips, or Better Cheddars, you're out of luck. The site only sells four kinds of cookies. As for baby items, all they sell are fruit, vegetables, and cereal, no—gasp!--diapers.
