Not ‘til Friday?! That’s pretty far out. Was that date given before or after you placed your order? ‘Just wondering if you had to wait for some items to get restocked. I was looking at our local Giant’s website earlier today. I’m in Bucks County. Is the pick up cart link the same one for Peapod? I have to pick up a prescription and thought about putting an order together online. I don’t want to wait a week for items like milk, eggs, and bread only to find out they’re not available. I don’t care about TP and those other kind of things in great demand, but it looks like people are overbuying everything. They did seem to list an awful lot of items in short supply from all categories with 2 item limits on many.

I put together the order, yes, on Peapod website (we're in Montco, near Chestnut Hill), and then when it was complete, I was given the pickup hours available. "Sold out" was the wording used. If I get everything on my order on Friday, I'll be happy. I am okay until then. Will know if there are snags on Friday.

Plan ahead is the motto. I'm not overbuying, but planning for a couple of weeks, mixing in what I have in the freezer.

Well, we picked up yesterday, and got maybe 1/2 of our order. I think I see the flaw in all this. I had marked "substitutions okay" on the order. The order form gives a huge inventory of what the store normally carries, But think about doing your own shopping: If you normally get an 18 pack of eggs, and those are out, you pick up a dozen, or organic or store brand or free-range, etc. Bananas: organic or non-organic. Canned clam chowder: 4 or 5 brands. Same for everything else you buy.

The items I did get were right on, as far as brand, size, etc. But it's possible that on the items I did not get, the concept of "subsitutions okay" is still too literal. Maybe they didn't have anything, but who knows.

So this is the glitch in shopping this way.

Happily, my DDIL is going to Trader Joes, Target, and we're going to work out a system to merge our grocery lists so they can shop for us.

I had placed an order with WalMart for curbside pickup and was able to select the date I wanted to pickup. I was lucky and received all but 4 items that were on my shopping list. So I placed an order for curbside pickup with Kroger's and had to wait for a 5 day period to pick up; today is the pickup date. I thought they would start shopping for my items when I placed the order, but I checked every day and not until this morning was my order annotated that they were now shopping for me. Sort of disappointed that they waited until the very last day to start the shopping. Will find out later if they were out of the items I wanted that were not available at WalMart.

This is also my first experience with not shopping myself. But decided it was the wise thing to do during this time of health possibly being compromised.

Good luck with the order. In my experience, the employee picking for the items just before delivery is standard. They have limited areas to store orders, which will only be worse now with the increased demand, and it's definitely a FIFO model. Kroger's supply chain so far isn't compromised, and they're constantly stocking overnight, so you have as good a chance of getting all your items as anyone else.

Thanks for that info, pllog. Never thought about a limited area to store orders. This is all so new to me, I have much to learn. I was not lucky enough to get my full order, but was lucky enough to get most of it.

NP. Great that you got most of your order! Even when shortages were unheard of, if I ordered from Instacart, after they were bought out (I think it was Amazon), I was lucky if I got all the items. Sometimes it came down to the employee not knowing where the item you wanted was displayed. In the original model, the picker was the driver and would call before checkout to discuss anything they couldn't find. That was heaven. Now they just plow through and do their best, and sometimes make weird choices and give you something you don't want. Before this crisis, e-mailing CS would get that taken off your bill.

At stores around here, where Instacart is contracted to do their deliveries, there's a shelf unit, not much bigger than a double bookcase, where they have regular brown paper grocery bags for pending orders. You can also see the pickers in the aisles with carts with these bags in them. There are metallic insulated liners in a few of the bags. At Whole Foods, at least, there's also some space in the walk-in cooler where they put refrigerator items. They used to put your whole cartful in the walk-in when they first went to separate drivers, to hold your order until the pick-up time, but as more people started using the service they would have had to stop that. They'd also put the cart in the fridge for someone who forgot their wallet Even in the good old days, ordering anything frozen was a crap shoot.

Curbside pickup uses a similar model. They pick from the store shelves. If it's run by the store itself, they often just pick and checkout the order and then keep it in the cart until pickup.

With the great increase in pickup/delivery orders, they'll be finding new ways to handle the volume. It may be that they do something like coopt an empty department or aisle for holding, or use a container in the parking lot, like they do for Thanksgiving. A lot of stores are having to invent how to do this, altogether, if they didn't have pickup/delivery in the past, or had so few orders that they just just put a stocker on it to pick, see it through checkout, and stand and wait with the cart for the driver to come. Simpler days. Sigh.

Counting my blessings I may not have to shop for at least 1 more week.

I've never done the curbside pickup, but I've done lots of buy online/pick up in store - only not for produce or perishables...