Peapod … where are you?

I hate grocery shopping. I have about a 30 minute threshold for time spent in supermarkets. If I don’t get everything I need within 30min, well, too bad for me. In my previous bachelor life this wasn’t much of an issue. I’d enter the supermarket, make a run down the juice isle (I easily go through about 2L of juice every two days), another run down the frozen pizza/burrito isle and maybe pick up some nacho chips on my way out. 20 min … easy. Now, however, I’m married to someone who likes to cook so it’s a whole different ballgame. Where my previous trips included only 2 isles, now we have to hit nearly all of them – including the isle with all the fresh green things.

Apparently the fresher the ingredients, the more time it takes to chose the correct item. One box of hot pockets is like any other box – you just grab one. However, when you pick out a tomato, it’s a much more involved process. I’m not sure exactly how it works (as I’m usually off to the side looking impatient and giving off a general vibe exuding my unhappiness with the whole grocery shopping experience) but it takes a while to find the “perfect” tomato. This process is then repeated for the entire fresh fruit and veggie section

Although she likes to cook, Katie, like me, doesn’t particularly like shopping (although you’d never know it by the amount of time she spends on it) so we opted to try Peapod. Peapod is an online grocery delivery service. They partner with a local supermarket (Giant here in DC, Stop & Shop in Boston) to deliver food right to your door for about $10 (or less, depending on how much you order). They have a nice website where you can peruse virtual isles and see pictures of all the items for sale. The benefit of using this service would be two-fold: 1) we don’t need to make the trip to the supermarket, and 2) we don’t need to haul groceries from our car to our apartment (which involves 3 flights of stairs and a long hallway). We had a $10 coupon reducing the delivery cost to $0 so we figured we’d try it out

The service must be doing ok because we selected our groceries on Saturday, but there wasn’t a delivery time-slot available until Monday evening. Our time slot was a window between 5-7pm. I’ve had many experiences (typically involving cable TV installations) where companies tout service between the hours of X and Y only to have it actually delivered at time Z, whose only relation to X and Y is that it typically falls within the same millennia. My empirical data has shown actual delivery times to be a random variable, unrelated to scheduled delivery times. If I ever get a PhD, my thesis would be entitled: “A comparative analysis between promised and actual delivery times of cable TV services in the United States – a study in chaos theory”. Unfortunately, Peapod wasn’t able to break the empirical trend.

Normally I’m happy to “roll with the punches” with late deliveries, but this delivery was complicated by a couple things.
1)The items to be delivered were a part of that evening’s dinner. Without them Katie was unable to start cooking.
2) Katie was hungry, and when Katie is hungry and unable to eat she gets very irritable. When Katie is irritable I can pretty much kiss my quiet evening of watching YouTube videos goodbye. This, in turn, makes me irritable as I am forced to console at Katie (while she watches the Food network … which doesn’t make her any less hungry. Also, it’s also one of my least favorite networks).

At 7:30pm I walked down to Noodles Etc. and bought dinner for us. The Peapod delivery finally arrived at a few minutes past 8pm – and only after a telephone call from me to the Peapod customer service division explaining in no uncertain terms my displeasure with their capabilities on delivering within what I thought was already a generous time window.

Sadly, after that experience we might be back to shopping at the grocery store in person.

Share on Facebook