Conventional wisdom says that paying to have your groceries delivered to your door is a waste of money. I have to disagree with this assessment. I have found that having my groceries delivered has saved me far more time and money than I could have ever done by shopping on my own. Yes, there is a charge to have the groceries delivered and you should give the tip to the person who delivers them, but even with these costs I still come out far ahead. These are some of the ways that having my groceries delivered saves me money:
First and foremost, I no longer need to drive. That means that I save money on the gas and wear and tear of my car that driving to and from the grocery store would cause. I also consider this to be environmentally friendly. While it's true that a van still needs to come and deliver the food that I order, the van is also delivering many other orders and so drives less than if everybody on the list went to the store.
Since I don't have to drive to the store and back, it frees up time that I would have spent doing this. It also frees up all the time that I would have had to spend inside the store looking for the groceries that I needed. Since I order a week's worth of food at a time and I usually made two to three trips a week to the grocery store before, even after spending the time on the Internet placing my order, I figured that I save three to four hours of my time by having my groceries delivered.
Shopping online also makes me much better organized. I have to choose a week's worth of ingredients for the meals that I'm going to be making and in order to do that, I need to plan them all out. Since I know that I will not be running to the store if I accidentally forget something, I am much more organized in my meal planning and the food that I buy. When I was shopping before, I made up meals as I walked the store aisles which made everything quite disorganized.
A direct result of being better organized is that I buy much less food than I was when I was going to the store on my own. Since I know exactly what I need and I can check my shelves if I am not sure, I don't buy doubles of things that I already have. Since I have the meals planned out, I don't buy extra things that I think that I might need, but that end up not being needed. All in all, a have reduced about 30% of the food that I used to purchase, but I feel like I have more of what I need.
One of the biggest benefits and money savers is that groceries shopping online takes away all impulse purchases. When I shop online, I'm focused on the exact food that I need and my eyes aren't wandering here and there to all those impulse purchases that I end up putting into my cart before. Having my groceries delivered saves me over $100 alone each month in impulse purchases I would have otherwise bought if I had been shopping in a store. read more
