Yeah I’ve never felt unsafe doing the grocery shopping. It’s not zero risk, but locking yourself inside for months and months without exercise, fresh air and social interaction isn’t healthy either.
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+1 to having done grocery shopping myself throughout the pandemic. I tend to avoid doing it on weekends when stores are more crowded. I think it’s relatively low risk while masked if it’s not very crowded and ventilation is good.
I have not eaten indoors in a restaurant since early 2020, and have only done so outdoors on a few occasions. That was a big lifestyle change for me. I’m looking forward to doing that again starting in May.
Wow.
I’ve been doing grocery shopping and dine in restaurants the entire time. My wife is the one who would be potentially high risk and she wasn’t willing to lock herself away over this. Honestly, she is much more of a social person than I am (cue the actuary jokes) and the isolation has not been good for her.
My spouse went back to the grocery store last week three times. They’ve only been sporadically since this started (more in the beginning, less middle to current), everything else has been order online from the store and have the store employees bring it to the car and put it in the back. In most cases, we are fine with substitutions, and the produce has been fine, much better than was expected by my spouse.
Being two weeks out from their second shot, they may never let another person do our grocery picking again though.
Yup, us too. Gone to grocery stores, Costco, Terrrget, home improvement stores, office supply stores,…
Well, not as much of the indoor dining part, especially since most local regulations didn’t allow it. Outdoors when provided (and comfortable weather-wise), and nowadays we inspect indoor areas to make sure they’re airy, and we will decline to enter if they don’t meet our satisfaction.
My theory is that one designated shopper can service dozens of families, thus reducing the number of people in grocery stores. A minor additional point is that it’s easier to do regular COVID-19 testing on one pro shopper than dozens of individuals shopping for themselves. There was a time when tests were quite limited.
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they service them all at once? i assume one at a time. is the time really cut down that much?
But exposure time matters, and it’s not as if they are shopping for 3 people simultaneously. And they are fairly low-paid employees who probably have worse access to testing than i have.
At the garden shop, where the regular employees will bring my stuff out of i ask them to, i call and do curb side pickup. But we’ve just been shopping ourselves rather than using door dash or the like.
They are probably a little more efficient because they know where everything is. But (based on my two times trying it) they need to text me from time to time about substitutions and stuff. I don’t think it’s much more efficient.
I know where everything is already. I have 2 supermarkets I frequent. I know them both.
Maybe there’s a modeling project for someone here. I figure fewer unique individuals in a given store is better, even if total time is the same.
Kind of like how I don’t mind spending all day with my spouse and kid, but would not want to spend an hour a day each with 48 random people.
Of course the real answer for my household is that we already used delivery services before the pandemic and just increased that usage a year ago.
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That, and especially earlier on there were a lot of people out of jobs. Doing grocery delivery also helped tide people over, especially before unemployment and stimulus started rolling out.
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I suppose it helps explain my caution to note, my state is at an all-time high for active cases. An increase of +206% active cases since March 1.We’re not seeing the decline that many states are.
my city was the highest in the entire country for a while. i did my own shopping anyway. got in and out as fast as possible. it was fine.
We’ve been using curbside pick up for groceries. One of the store employees said he much preferred people using curbside, as it meant fewer people in store.
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Huh, I had the opposite experience. I felt safer there than most grocery stores. 
Pretty soon I’m going to resume my pre-pandemic ritual of going to the grocery store 4-5 times a week instead of only once. And go back to lingering at target alone when I’m looking for some me time.
This is a good example. I remember being at a wedding and the bride was pregnant. So say what you want about that situation, but the table I was at (we were all co-workers of the groom) the guests were shocked and horrified that she had one sip of champagne during the toast.
Like seriously, unless she has an anaphylactic allergy to grapes or something, I’m pretty certain that one sip of champagne one time during her pregnancy is not going to harm the baby in the slightest. Yeah, fetal alcohol syndrome is a thing and I’d never deny that. I know several people who were born with FAS. But it takes a lot more than one sip of champagne one time.
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I think it depends. Services like Instacart tend to be one-offs. The shoppers are probably shopping for themselves at the same time, but mostly just one client… possibly two. (Source: several of my housewife friends do Instacart shopping here & there for a little extra cash.). So it is only slightly more efficient in terms of person-hours to complete the task than shopping yourself if you go through the store at the same speed as they do*
If you use the Target’s online shopping through their app or website then it’s a Target employee who is collecting items for your order. And they’re doing like 10 orders at once and they have a list of which items in which aisles for which customers. They push a big cart-like thing with bins that are segregated by customer. That seems very efficient to me in terms of person-hours attributable specifically to YOUR order and is probably having a more meaningful impact on reducing bodies in stores.
*Now if you’re like me you wander into the bread aisle to get a loaf of bread and then have the following conversation with yourself:
“Hmmm, Dave’s Killer Bread is on sale but it’s still more expensive than Brownberry. Should I splurge? Oh, look, hot dog buns. I bought hot dogs the last time I was at the store but I forgot buns. Let me go grab some of those before I forget since they’re not on the list. Now… Brownberry for $2.99 or Dave’s for $4.19… Eh, YOLO… Dave’s it is. Now I have four items that qualify for the ‘buy 5 save $5’ deal so I need to find one more… what should I get…”
I think the fact that this entire conversation with myself now happens in my family room at 11:30 PM when I’m in my PJs rather than at 6:00 PM in the store with loads of other shoppers around makes a more significant difference in terms of the number of people in the store at any given time.
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I have almost exclusively been using curbside pickup or instacart for the past year. I figured there are people who need jobs right now, I am not commuting past stores, and generally wanted to avoid COVID. I started going back to Costco later last summer once it appeared to be relatively low risk for COVID, but then paused that during the fall wave. I figured once things started calming back down again a few months ago, that I may as well just wait it out until after I got a vaccine.
Looking forward to going back to general browsing around at the stores in another few weeks. I might keep instacart for regular groceries as long as I am WFH, but do enjoy the regular trip to Costco every other week or so.