Throughout August, we bought groceries at Whole Foods, Natural Grocers, Safeway, and Walmart. We were exploring what each store offered, what the prices were, and we were trying different means of shopping. At Whole Foods and Natural Grocers we shopped on-site; they do not offer online shopping in our area. At Safeway, we shopped online once and had the groceries delivered, and we shopped once on-site. For Walmart, we shopped online and picked up the grocery’s curbside.
Results
Whole Foods offered the best selection of foods that we like to eat: organic, vegetarian, and vegan. Also, we liked the experience of shopping at Whole Foods–good music, good displays, good vibes. However, Whole Foods was more expensive than the other stores.
Natural Grocers was a smaller, more subdued version of Whole Foods. It offered a good selection for what we like to eat, although not as much as Whole Foods. Prices were high but more competitive than Whole Foods.
Safeway. The on-site shopping at Safeway was utilitarian. The employees were nice and the store was clean, but there was not much aesthetically or audibly appealing about our Safeway shopping experience. The large format wasted time. The selection was adequate for what we like to eat, and the prices were more competitive than Whole Foods and Natural Grocers. The online shopping at Safeway was good. The website was a little slow, but functional. Conveniently, the website saved our shopping list for future orders. The delivery to our door was on-time, and the delivery person was professional.
Walmart came up short on what we like to eat. It had the most limited organic selection of the test group and offered few vegetarian and vegan products. We thus could buy only eighty percent of our weekly needs at Walmart. However, what we did buy at Walmart was priced more competitively than the other stores we patronized. The website was fast and easy to use. We experienced problems at curbside pickup. We called the number posted at the pickup point three times, and nobody picked up the phone. We thus drove back to the main parking lot, parked, went into the store, stood in line at the service desk, and in turn explained to the clerk what was happening. She called the grocery staff on the public address system and asked us to wait. We waited a few minutes. Then the clerk told us to go back to the pickup point, and the grocery staff would be waiting for us. We walked back to the car and drove to the pickup point…and nobody was there. We waited about three minutes, and finally a grocery employee came with our groceries. He apologized for the delay and explained that there had been some miscommunication that morning. What should have been less than a five-minute evolution turned into a seventeen minute evolution, and that was a problem when a big selling point of curbside pickup was efficiency.
Conclusions
Where We’ll be Shopping
We previously primarily shopped at Whole Foods. Moving forward, we primarily will be buying our groceries online with delivery from Safeway. We’ll rotate Walmart in once or twice a month, and try its delivery service. Whole Foods and Natural Grocers will be relegated to occasional visits for targeted purchases. In summary, the combination of online convenience, competitive pricing, and solid selection made Safeway our go to store for groceries.
Online Shopping & Delivery
Online shopping and delivery for groceries was helpful in two ways. First, it saved us time. We didn’t have to drive to the store, park, navigate the perils of the parking lot, traipse up and down the aisles trying to find what were looking for, check-out, head back out to the car, load up the car, drive home, and unload the car. Also, we’ll save even more time on future orders because the website keeps our shopping list. Second, online ordering saved us money. As we selected items for purchase, the website calculated our running total, and that helped us keep our spending in check. Furthermore, we avoided on-site inducements to buy unnecessary items, thus saving more money. Indeed, our test of shopping on-site at Safeway resulted in a considerably higher bill than when we ordered online. (Note: the delivery fee is de minimis, especially in light of the time saved, the operating cost to drive to the store and back eliminated, and the spending control facilitated by online ordering).
P. Gustav Mueller, author of The Present