Food shopping with children is a nightmare. Fact.
I’ve written dozens of times about how I’d rather stage a sit-in protest in a walk-in freezer than take my kids to Tesco, and I stand by that. They simply don’t have the patience to stand around angelically whilst Daddy studies the prices of poultry to get a few pence off the weekly bill - quite frankly, neither do I. Rather they’ll run around and seek out chocolate - ripping open Mr Kipling boxes and helping themselves. You can hear the screams several aisles away, and the gasps of other shoppers as they accidentally knock my children off their feet with their trolleys.
Yet it goes further. I’ll admit to having cried at the tills before when Dex (at 3yrs old) attempted to conceal a Kinder Egg in his jacket and we’ve been halted by store security. Since then, we vowed never to take the kids to a supermarket ever again.
So we’re big fans of online shopping, especially the excellent introductory deals for each major supermarket from sites such as My Voucher Codes. For convenience sake, I think it’s a godsend, and you do tend to spend less when you aren’t flinging impulse buys into the trolley - a point well worth noting on the build-up to Easter where stores dedicate entire aisles to Thorntons, Lindt and eggs wrapped in Peppa Pig and Spider-Man, and dozens of other children’s characters.
You can trim a once two hour chore into ten minutes if you simply refer to an earlier digital basket and simply adjust your quantities accordingly. There’s no more bagging things up and hauling them from trolley to car to front door - so less risk of a rogue yogurt spilling forth over the rest of your shopping.
But it seems we’re in the minority of people who’ve embraced the online grocery shopping trend.
Unless you’re big into meal planning (we’re not great at planning anything) you can find yourself making costly mistakes. One bag of potato Smilies might seem like enough when it’s not physically in front of you, but it ends up looking a little lonely in your freezer. Yet it’s not just quantities that can go awry, shopping without the visual prompts that an in-store shop affords you, can mean you leave everyday essentials off the shop altogether. I can’t count the number of times we’ve unpacked our groceries then discovered we’re out of dishwasher tablets or bin bags…
… What happens then?
You end up going into a store for a few bits, then coming out with a haul that would put Kanye West to shame.
Simply re-ordering from an old list can make you pretty lazy too. When you’ve had lasagna, curried chicken and fajitas in a continuous cycle for several weeks, it can get dull. Essentially, leaving the aisles behind and just recycling old shopping lists doesn’t exactly inspire you to get adventurous in the kitchen.
Yet as bored as you are, you can’t help but balk as the running total shows a very real £ difference when you click beef over pork. If dieting, any good intentions may quickly dissipate when you see that it’ll cost you an extra £20 to swap sausage rolls for chicken salad every lunchtime - Thanks George Osborne - between you and Jeremy Hunt I’m “totally” inspired to drop the baby weight.
But for the infirm and disabled, this service is invaluable. Not only will your shopping arrive at a time that suits you, you will no longer have to struggle around a busy store and a friendly delivery man will even put your shopping in your kitchen cupboards for you. If we include those that don’t drive and have traditionally dragged their weekly food shop onto the bus, you can see why the supermarkets have stuck to their guns on this one - even if they have recently tweaked their delivery charges to reflect the slight lull in anticipated uptake.
It boils down to swings and roundabouts. It’s a much appreciated service to thousands of us with limited mobility and limited motivation, but it does have its own limitations.
I’m genuinely interested, have you purchased your supermarket shopping online? Does it work for you, or not?
