Key Takeaways
- Curbside grocery pick-up makes it easier to find what you need by allowing you to search for specific items without the hassle of navigating a store.
- Online shopping allows you to keep an eye on your bill as you add items to your cart, avoiding any surprises at checkout.
- Shopping online eliminates impulse buys by providing a more intentional approach, allowing you to avoid walking past tempting items and easily remove unwanted items from your cart before checking out.
Big technological advances like smartphones and AI get a lot of attention, but there are many more little advances in our daily lives. Your local grocery store likely has one such thing, and it could make your life much easier.
In early 2020, when the COVID-19 pandemic was heating up, many grocery stores and other retail stores started offering curbside pick-up. This was not a new thing by any means—Target started offering its curbside service in 2018—but demand due to the pandemic greatly accelerated the roll-out.
Like many people, I switched to getting my groceries via curbside pickup in 2020 and I’ve stuck with it to this day. Despite all the fancy gadgets and high-tech tools at my disposal, there’s something about curbside grocery pick-up that feels the most futuristic and life-changing. I’ll tell you why you should give it a try if you haven’t.
It’s Easier to Find What You Need
A common complaint among shoppers is hunting down where each store decides to put things. Even if you get comfortable with your store’s layout, it can be reorganized on a whim. And once you do find what you’re looking for, it feels like there’s always 20 different brands and varieties to choose from for every food item.
Online shopping has largely solved this problem, and it works just as well for grocery stores that offer curbside pick-up. Typing “strawberry jam” in a search bar and seeing a list of only strawberry jam is much easier than finding it in the store mixed together with a dozen other varieties. That also removes some of the anxiety of shopping—you’re not worried about hogging a section while lost in decision paralysis.
Further, if you’re inclined to price track the prices of common products you buy over time (either by brand or by general category) seeing everything laid out like you’re shopping online makes it very easy to note the prices in a Google Sheet or however you’re inclined to do so.
It Helps You Keep an Eye on Your Bill
Another benefit of online shopping is you can very easily see a running total of your order. When you add something to the virtual cart, the price is automatically added to whatever else is in the cart. You’d need to keep a mental tally in your head or use a calculator to do this in the store. Personally, I never bothered with that, which often made the total at checkout an unwelcome surprise.
Some grocery stores have started to offer a hybrid between online and physical shopping. The idea is that you scan items with an app on your phone while you shop, essentially adding them to both your physical and virtual carts, then you pay from the app on your way out. This is a nice middle ground that also makes it easier to see your running order total, but doing it all online is still easier.
You Can Avoid Impulse Buys
Oops.
Let’s be honest, we’ve all plopped something we didn’t need in the cart while wandering around the grocery store. I wasn’t here for Doritos and peanut butter ice cream, but dang, they look good. I have found it’s much easier to avoid those impulses with the more intentional approach of online shopping.
As mentioned above, finding things is so much easier when you can simply search for them. If I need tortilla chips, I can search for “tortilla chips” and see only tortilla chips. I’m not forced to walk past the Doritos, Cheetos, Pringles, and cheese dips to get there. Stores are literally designed to make you walk past things in hopes that you’ll buy more stuff. Shopping from a website or app avoids the walk-by-and-grab effect.
And even if you did impulsively put something in your virtual cart because the shopping portal your local grocery store put some tasty and tempting treats in front of you, there’s always the last review of the items in your cart before you check out. In real life we’re strongly inclined to not walk all the way back to the junk food aisle and put the Oreos back on the shelf or sheepishly hand them to the cashier to toss in a bin under the checkout counter for later restocking. When virtually shopping, however, it’s just a single click or two to remove unwanted items. Nobody needs to know your virtual cart had Oreos, Double Stuf Oreos, and a bag of holiday-themed Oreos too.
It’s an Incredible Time Saver
I’ve saved the best reason for last, and it’s probably not too surprising. Curbside grocery pick-up is so, so much faster than walking through a store. This is the part of the experience that often makes me feel like I’m really living in the future.
The beauty of online shopping is you don’t have to build your whole order in one sitting. When you use the last slice of bread, you can add bread to your virtual shopping cart right then and there. Adding items as you go about your day means it’s much easier to make your list when the time comes. You already have a bunch of stuff sitting in your cart, and all you have to do is finalize it. It’s so much better than using a generic shopping list because then you have to take that generic shopping list and either take it to the store or input it into the virtual list anyway. By simply using shopping app for your favorite local store as your shopping list to mark down when you run out of eggs, milk, and other staples, you’re always ready to go to place an order for all the things you need.
With curbside pickup all I have to do is tap a few buttons on my phone to pick out some food (or just checkout with the shopping list I filled up over the last week), choose a time to pick it all up, tap some more buttons when I arrived at the store, and then the food is brought out to my car. That entire process—the online shopping, driving to the store, waiting for the order to be brought out, driving back home, and putting the food away—easily takes less time than I would spend just walking through the store.
It can be challenging to ditch the old ways of doing things for newer methods—and newer is not always easier—but it’s well worth it in the case of curbside pick-up. For people who have limited time or just plain don’t enjoy meal planning and grocery shopping, you absolutely need to give it a try.
