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Smart grocery shopping during the pandemia

One of the perks of staying home is that we can now have more time to cook. But to do so we need grocery supplies. What are your options these days?

The safest would obviously be to get online, go to the website of your local supermarket chain, spend time surfing through all their products, make a list of what you need, add it to the shopping cart, review and pay with your credit card, and get everything the next day. Unfortunately, you are not the only one thinking that way. While you can make your list and add it to your shopping cart you are going to find in most cases that the next day delivery slot is not available, nor the day after, nor the day after the day after and so forth. Usually you can book slots for up to 6 days in advance, which is great, but they are all sold out!

But you are smart, so while online you check if your supermarket offers pickup options and you find that it does. You look for available pickup slots and to your dismay you find that they are all taken as well. No, not all of them, you found one available for next Thursday -today is Monday- between 5:30 and 6:00pm. That is not so bad, you can do that. You go ahead and reserve it. But then you remember that you have a work teleconference at that time, so your spouse will have to do the pickup. But she is not available now as she is in a teleconference herself with her employer, so you’ll have to wait to ask her. You do something else, and once she is done you asked her, she says yes, and you get back to the website. You were logged out because it took you over one hour to get the answer, you try to get back in, but the system is overloaded. After many attempts, you are finally in, you see your shopping list, but you no longer see the time slot you reserved! What happened? You realized that the platform only holds the reservation for 90 minutes. Well that is OK, you go back to the reservation page, but now, your slot is gone! You go through all the available slots and they are all taken.

What is next? You have no option but to make a trip to the grocery store!

Share your experiences with us.