Had enough of the weekly ritual of facing long check-out lines, waiting for parking, and dodging foot traffic while doing your grocery shopping at Whole Foods? Skip it all by using Instacart and have your groceries delivered to you in as little as under an hour and for only $5.99. (available throughout the Metro DC area including in Bethesda, Silver Spring, Chevy Chase, Washington DC, McLean and Herndon)
How it works: You set up an account at Instacart’s website and then create you’re your shopping list by searching and selecting items that are listed on the website. Virtually all of the items that are available at your local Whole Foods will be available on the website. An Instacart personal shopper will then collect all of your items at the store, hand them off to a colleague that will deliver them directly to your door.
There are a few downsides, occasionally Whole Foods will run out of the product that you ordered and your shopper will replace it with a comparable item i.e. non organic kale in lieu of organic (usually, once our beets were replaced with radishes?!). Your shopper may not be a discerning as you would be when selecting produce and lastly, although frozen items are kept in temperature controlled environment, we have found that on occasion frozen items are not 100% frozen by the time they are delivered. For us these are relatively small draw backs given the convenience and time saved used the service.
It’s still to be seen if there will be any changes to the service now that Amazon has purchased Whole Foods and hopefully it may lead to lower prices on some of the stores items. Instacart also works with stores, such as Costco, Safeway, CVS and others.