During the intense days of the Covid pandemic, many people do not want to go to grocery stores and shop for food. Even though everyone were wearing masks, the stores had one-way aisles and people were trying tp keep distance between each other, the thought of being around potential Covid carriers was scary. Hence, a number of supermarkets began offering home delivery.
Now that the extreme part of the pandemic appears to be over, grocery stores such as Amazon Fresh, Walmart, Giant, Lidl and others still offer home delivery. As far as pricing, I dug around on the internet this morning to compare the pricing differences between shopping instore vs. home delivery. I was sort of surprised to see that even before tipping the deliverers, the price increase could be as high as $70 bucks, with most ranging $30-$50 dollars.
From a time standpoint, not driving to the store, going up and down the aisles, waiting at the checkout and then lifting heavy packages from the cart onto your car trunk may all be worth the $30-$70 dollars extra you are paying for the convenience of home delivery.
However, an even more important health issue about home delivery that was pointed out to me by a patient I saw yesterday: My patient me that a major reason why she utilizes home delivery from the supermarket is because this takes away her temptation to buy additional “stuff” when she walks the aisles herself. This added “stuff” tends to be the things we all may succumb to when walking up and down the candy, snacks and bakery aisles. I am as guilty as anyone else in doing this: When I do my weekly shopping thing at Giant I inevitably place in the cart some bakery item on sale, ice cream and/or other “treat” that I had no intention of buying in the first place.
Know yourself: If you can prepare a shopping list, go to the store and not be tempted to start buying derailing food/drink items not on that list, do the instore shopping thing. However, if you know you will “stray” off that list and bring back to your pantry or freezer those foods/snacks that will harm your quest for better health, then do the home delivery thing.
And above all, do NOT go the supermarket without a prepared shopping list. This will result in coming home with stuff that will hurt your weight control efforts.
Any Springsteen fans out there? Here is one of his lesser known hits: “Queen Of The Supermarket”.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q1BPuLZ995M
