Prompt Service #4: Online Shopping

The third installment picked from my book of writing prompts.  Do you prefer online shopping or in-person shopping?  Since the lockdown, I've done pretty much all my shopping online for obvious reasons.  Do I miss in-person shopping?  Not all that much.

A couple of times I've used the Kroger app to buy groceries I can't easily get shipped like milk or cheese or frozen stuff.  There are some downsides to this as you can't necessarily find the cheapest brands of things and it can be hard to find some specific things.  Shopping the Kroger app, which uses Instacart, there's like a $9.99 fee plus unless you're a jerk you have to put a tip on there.  I heard that some assholes put a tip on there but then the app for Instacart lets you pull the tip later on, so some people change it to $0 once they get their shit.  That's a really shitty thing to do, especially since these shoppers are risking catching a deadly plague primarily for the tips they get.  Anyway, between the fee and tip, you can wind up paying $30 more for your groceries.

Besides Kroger, I've cobbled together supplies from a variety of sources:  Amazon, Big Lots, and Target mostly.  Usually in online shopping Amazon is the way to go, but as cities locked down, people rushed online to Amazon to buy stuff, so they ran out of some things.  But also, Amazon has all those third-party sellers that can make things really confusing.  You don't always know where those third-party sellers are (many of them could be all the way in China even) or how long it might take them to ship stuff.  And if you're ordering a bunch of stuff it can be annoying because your 56 things might come in 52 orders, so mostly I use it to order one or two things at a time like cough drops, sausage gravy, and Sparkling Ice carbonated flavored water because you can't really get Diet Pepsi shipped from anywhere, so that helps to stretch out what I do have.

Big Lots I only used once because they sent me a $5 off coupon.  I got some sheets on clearance but then also some groceries like fruit cups and instant coffee.  The problem with their site was they didn't have a lot of stuff to ship.  Most of it was like, "You can pick it up in store."  Um, genius, the stores are the problem!  Whether you go in the store two minutes or ten minutes you're still potentially exposing yourself to the virus.  So that kind of limited what I could order.  You couldn't get tuna, but you could get sardines!  And something called "kipper snacks."  I only got 1 of the latter and 2 tins of sardines that I haven't eaten yet.  I figure if it gets to the point where I am eating those, it's one step above killing and eating my neighbors.  I might have ordered some stuff from them again, but the next time I checked their site, they didn't have most of the stuff I ordered the first time for shipping.

Target became the mainstay for my pantry purchases.  They had an OK selection of things like tuna, mayo, ketchup, syrup, and Spam.  One thing I was kinda missing was Chinese food.  I think the only restaurant in my immediate area closed down and I haven't felt like going to Panda Express.  You couldn't get stuff like LaChoy chow mein or anything, but I did get Thai rice noodles and some teriyaki and ginger sauce to make a quasi-Asian dish.  I got some comfort food too in spray cheese and Pringles.  Plus I got some Atkins bars and shakes and some medical stuff like famotidine (Pepcid AC), Imodium AD, Nexium, and antacid.  The only thing that sucks with Target is they tend to just throw shit willy-nilly into a box without really putting any padding in there.  I had a cup of peaches and oatmeal that burst open because they didn't pad the box and it was shipping from Washington state to Michigan.  But I did get the money back for that and one of the cups was salvageable, so it wasn't a total loss.

I do miss browsing the Walmart/Meijer/Target clearance bins a little and looking for interesting bargains at Ollie's, Five Below, or Big Lots.  But I don't miss the crowds or parking or idiots leaving carts willy-nilly in aisles and the parking lot.  Like a lot of things, you don't really miss in-person shopping that much when you can't or just don't want to take the risk of doing it.