The following article is based on chapter 7 from Shop Online the Lazy Way, a book written by Richard Seltzer, which was published in August 1999 by Macmillan. It is available in paperback directly from the author or from Amazon.com. It is also available in a Braille edition from National Braille Press (www.nbp.org). This work is copyright 1999 by Richard Seltzer. All rights are reserved. Check the author's bio for a description of this book and why it was written.
Now that the rights have reverted to the author, he is free to update and revise this online version. Please send email to alert him of changes and interesting new sites that you have encountered.
The major online grocery supermarkets are set up to provide the most benefit to those who buy a lot of items at a time and return frequently. They offer convenience and time savings, at reasonable but not cut-rate prices. And, typically, delivery charges more than wipe out the savings from any "specials" unless your order is large enough to qualify for free delivery.
If you are the sort of person who doesn't put much value on time savings, uses lots of coupons, and goes to two or three different real-world grocery stores a week in order to chase the lowest prices, don't bother with the online supermarkets. Do it your way.
If there are gourmet treats that you crave for yourself or would like to buy as a gift, and that aren't available locally, check the online specialty food shops. Once again, you aren't likely to find bargains. A discount of 20 percent off doesn't mean much for relatively low-priced items if you then have to add shipping charges. But you might be able to quickly and conveniently purchase merchandise that otherwise would be very hard to find, except by catalog or while traveling.
For the cheese lover, consider International Gourmet's World of Cheese www.igourmet.com. There you can sign up for the Cheese of the Month and get "a different, exciting world-class gourmet cheese at the beginning of every new month!" You can also order individual items, check cheese-related recipes, and chat with other cheese lovers.
For fresh or smoked seafood shipped overnight from Florida, check Shore to Door Seafood www.shoretodoor.com. That's where you can find Atlantic salmon, swordfish, yellowfin tuna, etc. Shore to Door also offers almost every type of fresh seafood you could ever crave, from stone crab claws in season, to Gulf-fresh shrimp, to live Maine lobster. All items are shipped fresh to your door for a truly gourmet treat. What's your preference?
If you are more interested in health than taste, and if you are particularly concerned about the use of pesticides and other chemicals, you should take a look at the vegetables and fruits available from Diamond Organic www.diamondorganics.com. There you can take a guided tour of the family farm, and meet the family as well as view the produce. To get started, you can order a variety of samplers for about $50, including overnight Federal Express delivery.
Do you crave the perfect cut of beef? Then consider specialty grocers Dean & Deluca www.dean-deluca.com. At this Web site, you can find a 12-lb., bone-in rib roast for $150 or six 10-oz. filet mignon steaks for $80. You'll have to add on shipping, of course--$10 for standard 7--10 day delivery of that filet mignon and $30 for UPS next-day delivery. Dean & Deluca also offers caviar, smoked fish, cakes, pastries, fruits, and many other items. If you are a connoisseur of fine apples, perhaps you'd like their apple sampler (10-lb., 12 apples) for $45, plus shipping.
Are you just dying for goat cheese in oil or white truffles? Then try the "Delicacies" area at Balducci's www.balducci.com. You can also get canned anchovies in their "Specialties" area and a wide variety of homemade pastas and sauces in their "Pasta" section.
In addition to pastas, Balducci's also offers completely prepared entrees, like rack of lamb or chateaubriand, ready to put into your oven and complete with the necessary instructions to finish cooking the entrée items. Buying ready-to-cook gourmet items changes the whole process for busy people who like to entertain.
For more exotic recipes, like potato-and-goat-cheese galette, check Cooking.com www.cooking.com. This site provides complete cooking instructions, including steps and related details, as well as nutritional analysis. Unfortunately, you'll have to shop for the ingredients elsewhere. While the site does sell some specialty foods, including pastas, herbs, salsas, and dips, these ingredients are not correlated with the recipes. Cooking.com's main line of products appears to be cookware, tableware, and cookbooks.
Frieda's www.friedas.com offers Asian and Latin produce, along with exotic fruits and nuts from around the world.
GreatFood.com www.greatfood.com lets you browse by category, brand, review, or meal occasion (such as "back packing, barbecue, beach party[el], cocktail party). This site also has a gift finder where your choices are arranged by price range, in case you'd like to send some Beluga caviar to your aunt in Poughkeepsie.
For herbal tea, including a Tea of the Month offer, visit Snowbound Herbals www.sbherbals.com. This site's related products include herbal oils, salves, and massage oils. Here you'll also find lots of articles related to herbs and teas and how they can benefit your health.
If you want to buy wine or beer online, keep in mind that all deliveries will require an adult signature. As they say at Virtual Vineyards www.virtualvin.com, "Someone of legal age must be at the shipping address during the day to sign for and accept the packages. Packages cannot be left without the signature of an adult." This procedure is intended to prevent minors from buying alcoholic beverages online, and is necessary to comply with state laws. Other online wine dealers include K&L Wine Merchants www.klwines.com and SendWine www.sendwine.com which are set up primarily to handle gift purchases and corporate or multiple orders.
To find an online store that offers the specialty that meets your individual taste, try going to Yahoo! www.yahoo.com; in the query box on the opening page, type the name of the item you want. For instance, enter "Amish food" and then click on the first link, and you'll get three choices--one in Pennsylvania Dutch country and the other two in Illinois. Or enter "lobster" and click on the first link, and you'll get a list of dozens of suppliers. As an alternative route, you can go through the cascade of menus at Yahoo!, clicking first on Business and Economy, then Companies, then Food, and continue down whatever path strikes your fancy. To browse for gourmet, special food, wine, and beer stores at Looksmart www.looksmart.com, click on Shopping, then Food & Wine.
An hour or two? What else could you be doing with that time? And how often do you end up making quick trips to the store to pick up items you forgot the last time or things you ran out of unexpectedly? For me, it's about two or three times a week. Of course, those short trips don't take as long as the main one. But that does add up to a total of over three hours a week, every week (even when I'm on vacation!), just grocery shopping. And every time I walk into a supermarket, I end up coming out with more than what I intended to buy. I'm a sucker for well-packaged, well-placed, and well-priced impulse items.
What's the alternative? Shopping online, of course. Some Internet-based grocery services are nationwide and use shipping companies for delivery. But most are local or work in partnership with local supermarkets. Today, your choices will depend largely on where you happen to live.
The Grocery Shopping Network www.groceryshopping.net/storelocator.htm, which recently merged with eGrocery, provides a service that helps existing grocery stores with physical sites to also do business online. With their store locator, you can browse through a list of hundreds of stores, scattered across most states in the U.S.
Once these services reach volume, they are likely to thrive and spread rapidly. This business is tough. The vendors are ramping up for what should become a very lucrative market ($85 billion by 2007, according to articles at the Grocery Shopping Network). But at the moment, they all seem to be losing money. They need to attract enough customers to reach the volume that will make them profitable. In the meantime, if you are fortunate enough to have a local service, try using it immediately. These new companies are doing everything they can to attract and keep customers like you.
The online-only businesses buy food at wholesale prices, just like the local grocery stores do, but operate with far less overhead than physical stores, which have to invest in and maintain attractive store space and have higher payrolls, with cashiers and others involved in face-to-face customer interaction. Hence, online grocery service could become extremely profitable. But to reach volume, they need to induce ordinary people like you to change long ingrained grocery-buying habits. That's difficult, despite the promised convenience and time savings.
So expect the online supermarkets to keep coming up with new services and tempting special offers and discounts. Now is a great time to be an online consumer.
You can also check the major directories--LookSmart www.looksmart.com, and Yahoo! www.yahoo.com--and browse through their lists of food stores in hopes of finding one or more in your area.
Delivery
You've been buying groceries in supermarkets all your life and probably take for granted all the time-consuming steps involved. Now that you're shopping a totally new way, you'll be going through new steps that will feel awkward until you've repeated them often enough for them to become routine. That's when you will begin to see the real time savings.
You'll find that the different services, under the pressure of competition, tend to provide similar shopping experiences. Nearly all will provide you with a choice of ways to find the items you want. For instance, you should be able to search by generic names of foods and by brand name. You should also be able to browse through categorized lists of items. Choose a method that matches your way of thinking and remembering, and build your new routine around that. Given your style, you may find it particularly important to be able to:
Do they offer fresh produce, or only canned and packaged foods? Much of the convenience of online shopping comes from getting everything or just about everything from a single service. Watch out if there's a category of food that the online services don't carry and that you need all the time. These are some good questions to ask:
You might want to store-hop and comparison shop for specialty and gourmet items, but for your standard milk, bread, soda, snacks, meat, and vegetables--the foods that are on your shopping list week after week--stay put, unless the store has done something that undermines your loyalty. You have made an investment of time to figure out how their Web site works and learned to find and order the things that you want. Don't throw that away by trying out one service after another. Rather, learn to use one very well, and take advantage of all the convenience features.
Grocery shopping isn't a matter of buying one or even half a dozen items and lingering to make sure that each is "just right." Rather, you need dozens, perhaps even a hundred items every week. You are not a professional shopper. You have a life to live. You want to get this over with, quickly and efficiently. And because you will incur service and delivery charges if your order is below a minimum (typically around $60), there's not much to gain from item-by-item price comparisons from one store to another. In fact, being too choosy about prices will end up costing you not only time but money, since you'll have to pay for multiple deliveries.
Actually, the experience is not that different from your first time through a new supermarket "superstore." You are faced with aisle after aisle after aisle, and nothing seems to be organized the way it was at the store you used to go to.
In both cases, there's a learning curve. It's far easier the second time. And eventually the organization of the store becomes part of the map of your mind, and you know without even thinking about it just where to find what.
Actually, an online store is likely be very systematic, following a strict hierarchy of categories. In contrast, a0 physical store is laid out for efficiency of the operation (such as placing refrigeration units next to the wall), and to tempt you with impulse items up front near the check-out counter.
But there is no getting around the fact that newcomers will find it tedious to fight their way through the online grocery catalogs. This is a major barrier, and the vendors are scrambling to find solutions.
For instance, NetGrocer let's you type in your shopping list, however is natural to you, and tries to automatically match what you've typed with what it has in its catalog.
HomeRuns prints its complete catalog and periodically sends it to customers by snail-mail. They do that in part because their business isn't only on the Web--you can also phone (800 number) or fax. But the printed version of the catalog can come in handy for online shoppers as well. The organization is the same as on the Web, and you can flip through and get a feel for the whole thing, rather than stepping through one Web page at a time. You can check off the items you want while on the train or subway to and from work, while waiting for an appointment, or during a boring meeting. Then, once you've made your choices, transferring the information to the Web is a breeze.
If you suddenly run out of a couple items, like milk and bread, or you unexpectedly learn you'll be having guests for dinner, forget the Internet. Just pick up what you need at a local store.
The Internet makes sense for groceries:
Exception--if and when there's a convenient pick-up point (e.g., your company's parking lot) and your Internet grocer lets you pick up the same day you place your order. Eventually, that kind of service may be commonplace; it may take service like that to move large numbers of grocery shoppers to the Internet. But today, that kind of service is very rare.
Go to AltaVista Search and click on Advanced Search. Then in the top box, enter the word "recipe" (without the quotes). In the bottom box, just type in a list of an ingredients. Don't worry about punctuation--just enter the words. Click on Search. In a second or two you should see a list of Web pages that mention the word "recipe" and that also have those ingredients, with the pages that have all those ingredients at the top of the list. Click on the ones that look interesting. With a little luck, that could be your next meal--without your having to go to the store.
Some online stores offer enormous selection--more brands and sizes than you are likely to find in a typical supermarket. Just once, take the time to consider options you've never tried before, and add the good ones to your regular list.
Find and buy all the cookbooks you could ever imagine at Amazon.com, or at an online store that specializes in your favorite kind of food and style of cooking.
Consider the value of time saved--especially in mid-winter when the weather is horrendous and the traffic impossible, or in the fall and spring, when your kids are heavy into school activities and you just don't have time to go to the store. Or when you are just plain too tired.
Having easy access online to lists of what you've bought each week, you can see what you've spent and what you've spent it on, helping you to better plan and manage your money over extended periods of time.
It's time to count your blessings. Shopping online, you won't bump into your mother-in-law or that neighbor down the street who talks forever when you run into her. You also won't face the inevitable delays at the check-out line--trainee clerks who aren't sure what to do, price checks, and people who insist on writing checks in the cash-only line.
At most online supermarket sites, you can see the total of your order as you go along by taking a look at your "shopping cart." That is the page that summarizes the choices you have made. At that page, you can easily delete or substitute products to stay within budget and see the adjustment to your total each time, rather than guessing as you typically have to do at your neighborhood store.
It's going to take awhile to learn what's where, and how to click your way through to a completed order. So make your first trial runs when you have time to spare--for instance, when you call for service and are put on hold, when you have to wait for a repair person to arrive, or while waiting for your 6-year-old to complete his video game and get ready for bed. Later, when you need to order groceries in a hurry, you'll be prepared.
You probably already have a to-do list on your computer. Now keep a grocery list, adding to it whenever you run of something that you use regularly. That will make it a snap to compose your online order.
Even if you don't shop on the Internet, you can still use the Web to save money on your groceries with online coupons. At NetDeals www.netdeals.com/grocery.html, enter your zip code to find out which local supermarkets participate. Then choose the coupons you want and print them.
If you really like to use coupons, CoolSavings www.coolsavings.com offers coupons for retail locations other than grocery stores. Some of their deals are offered by K-mart, Kids "R" Us, and H&R Block.
If you are a community-oriented person, you may want to try a variety of high quality, mostly frozen foods sold by Market Day www.marketday.com This shopping service is really a fund-raising organization for private schools and other types of related organizations. Once a month, Market Day supplies a convenient four-page brochure from which you can make your selections. Market Day then delivers the ordered items by truck monthly to the school or organization using the food sales service as a fund-raiser. All foods offered are of restaurant quality, although some are packaged in larger-than-usual quantities. If you are not sure of a school or organization in your area that is part of the Market Day program, contact the Web site, and they will be able to locate the nearest member of their fund-raising network.
If you do have same-day delivery to a convenient pick-up point, you can, from the office, prepare for the guests your spouse just invited to dinner. Just choose a recipe and let the online service calculate what you need and assemble the order for you.
Once you've placed your first online grocery order, hop in the car and head to the supermarket. Bring a lounge chair and relax on the grass near the parking lot. It's time to gloat while everyone around you is scrambling to do their "real world" shopping.
For more resources, see the Groceries section of our Online Shopping Directory www.samizdat.com/shopping3.html#groceries
The rest of the book (Shop Online the Lazy Way):
Part One covers aspects of online shopping that apply no matter what you want to buy.
Published by B&R Samizdat Express, 33 Gould St., West Roxbury, MA 02132, seltzer@samizdat.com
You can order the book Shop Online the Lazy Way directly from the author (seltzer@samizdat.com) or from Amazon.com If you buy it after clicking on this Amazon link, Richard will get some money back from Amazon as part of their Associates program, as explained in this chapter.
You may also want to check Richard's Online Shopping Directory www.samizdat.com/shopping.html, which has links to all the sites mentioned in the entire book, plus sites he has learned of since the book went into production.
You are also welcome to participate in Richard's weekly chat sessions about Business on the World Wide Web, Thursdays, from noon to 1 PM. For details and edited transcripts of previous sessions (dating back to June 1996) check www.samizdat.com/chat.html
Related articles and reference materials:
Online shopping advice
All about movies
The Online Shopping Directory
Return to B&R Samizdat Express home page .
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