<p>D2 just moved into her first apartment in the Boston area, and has given up her car. She is within a couple of blocks of a Whole Foods Market, but as we all know, it’s more of an upscale grocery store and can be pricey for a struggling 22-year old.</p>
<p>I checked yesterday, and Peapod does deliver in her area, but I read that the minimum order is $60, which would require a lot of food for a single person to buy at once. Delivery charges are substantial, too, but when I thought about it, perhaps the money saved by not shopping at Whole Foods could justify the delivery charge.</p>
<p>So, the reason I’m asking; I thought about getting her a Peapod gift certificate for Christmas, to help ease the shock of not having a car for trips to the grocery store. Even if I got her $100, with the delivery charge, and minimum order, I just don’t know if it would justify the gift. She might be better off going to Whole Foods.</p>
<p>Who uses Peapod, and are there any tricks to getting the most out of the experience?</p>
<p>I’m a college student and I love Peapod. I break even or save money using Peapod since the local grocery store is expensive (plus, Teriwtt, Peapod for Chicago gets their food from a suburb so you don’t need to pay Chicago city taxes). Besides avoiding expensive grocery stores, you also save on time and gas. If your daughter wouldn’t be driving to WholeFoods, keep in mind that it’s really difficult for an individual to go grocery shopping alone if they need to carry the groceries home. If you have toilet paper and a gallon of milk, your hands are almost full already.</p>
<p>It’s best to get orders over $100 since then you get the minimum delivery charge. It’s not hard to get orders over $100. I often buy more food than I immediately need and freeze the extras, and I can also buy things like cleaning products, medicines, and razor blades through Peapod when I need them. In between orders, I can pick up milk or any produce I need locally if I run out. When I signed up, for the first three months delivery was free. I’m assuming that deal is still going on. Peapod is also good with sale items. They tell you what’s on sale, and when you ‘browse through the aisles’ the products all list price per pound/ounce/item, so it’s easy to see which items are the best deals. The prices themselves are pretty good. I just logged on to my account and looked up a few items. Milk is $1.99 for a gallon for the generic brand, a 16 ox box of Prince pasta is $1.49, and a dozen eggs are $1.33.</p>
<p>Peapod also frequently throws in free gifts. I’ve gotten tissues, an apple, a box of pasta, a half pound of turkey from the deli, a small container of Tide, and other items as free gifts. Your delivery comes next day, and you can choose the delivery time within a 2-hour window, so you don’t need to stay home and wait all day.</p>
<p>How far is she from the nearest Shaws, Foodmaster, Trader Joes? I live about a half mile from the grocery store, and just use a backpack for carrying groceries. It’s not bad. If she’s near a T stop, taking the T to the grocery store wouldn’t be too bad either.</p>
<p>My son in Boston uses peapod all the time but I haven’t been able to figure out how to get a gift certificate for it. It doesn’t seem like I can find that option available. We have worked out a system where he uses my credit card within certain limits. It’s cheaper than a school meal plan and he is on a pretty particular diet so it works for us.</p>
<p>Have you looked online for the store to buy a gift card from there? Also we have friends that buy scripts (sold through schools and churches—a % is donated to the church and you get the gift card —our church has everything from Safeway, Costco, Applebees, Arby’s, the limited, ITunes,etc) </p>
<p>Otherwise buy a visa gift card and when they order on line they use the gift card. We have told our relatives to do that. They just use the gift card at the check out area, just like your credit card, plus, he can have it re-loaded for birthdays, etc.</p>
<p>I use Peapod on occasion,especially when I was shopping for more than just my order alone (like for my elderly mother for example).Like others have said, you get to pick the delivery time for your convenience,and if you live up flights of stairs, they carry it up. Once you are a customer, you get mailings and emails with offerings like free delivery, $5 off, etc.If you are more flexible with time, they offer savings for a bigger delivery window,like $1.50 off for a four hour block of delivery time.The evening before your order day the website will give you an estimated time. The website keeps track of your order with a running total, tells you specials,etc. It will keep your list for you from your last order… One of the best reasons to use it is it prevents impulse shopping, which can be a significant added cost .On one of those snowy, bitter cold or rainy days you will be so glad you gave it a try.
I’ve had them pick produce for me and they do very well. You can for example, ask for ripe or unripe bananas,and if you order deli meats and cheeses you can specify how you want it sliced …thick or thin…</p>
<p>My mom just called me and said she ordered Peapod for the first time in MA. It sounds like it’s more expensive than in Chicago. She didn’t get all of the deals I’ve gotten, and the delivery fee was significantly higher. So I guess it depends on the particular program in your area.</p>
<p>Whole Foods is the closest grocery store to her apartment; about two blocks. Her roommate has a car, so when they need things like TP and PT, her roommate can handle those. The closest T stop is about a block further than Whole Foods, in the other direction, so it’s definitely the most convenient place for her to shop.</p>
<p>teriwttt, I wonder if our daughters are near each other…does she live in Brookline ?
mine cannot stay away from Whole Foods, though I keep telling her she needs to tone it down…
I always wondered about Peapod, though it would never work for me…I am assuming it is good for staples but how do you let someone else pick out your fresh food ?</p>
<p>lje62 - she lives in Brighton, from what I understand after my own and only trip out there two weeks ago, is right next to Brookline. It’s really an easy walk for her, and she actually enjoys that kind of lifestyle, but I know there will be times where she’d prefer a delivery over a trip to the store. </p>
<p>I’m still thinking about it, but when I picked her up at the airport today (after I posted the OP), she said that a lot of times, she will talk to her roommate during the day and they will decide on something for dinner, and the roommate will stop at the grocery store on the way home from work. My D is not working yet… starts an internship the first of the year, downtown, and will be taking the T. When she starts working and has more of a employment schedule (the internship is only part-time, so she’s also looking for another part-time job) she might appreciate delivery more.</p>
<p>I know I looked at it around here a couple of years ago, and like corranged said, I think delivery is much cheaper and the minimum is lower.</p>
<p>Two years ago, I was unable to grocery shop for almost three months because of a broken leg, and it was not convenient for other members of my family to do the routine shopping.</p>
<p>Peapod was a godsend. I don’t see how my family could have functioned without it during that time.</p>
<p>However, Peapod is not perfect. I found that the minimum was one of the problems, even though I was buying for three people. I often got around that by buying some non-food items – such as toiletries and cleaning supplies – as part of my order. On a few occasions, I bought extra quantities of things that have a long shelf life, such as bottled water, canned soup, or laundry detergent, just to get my order up to the minimum. I knew I would use up those products sometime, so I wasn’t really wasting money. But this approach to reaching the minimum may not be a convenient thing for an apartment dweller because of a lack of storage space.</p>
<p>The second problem with Peapod is that you can’t pick the fresh foods yourself. If you order a bag of prepackaged salad or a package of cheese, for example, you never know whether you’re going to get one that expires tomorrow or a week from tomorrow.</p>
<p>The third problem is that having to be home for a delivery you scheduled two days ago is often surprisingly inconvenient (unless you have your leg in a brace and are getting around in a wheelchair, meaning that you’re unlikely to go out anyway). </p>
<p>Also, if Peapod in your area is anything like Peapod in my area, never buy bananas or anything else that can be damaged by getting too cold. Peapod has ways of protecting perishable food from getting warm, but it doesn’t seem to have ways of protecting foods like bananas from getting cold. After receiving black bananas three times in a row, I gave up.</p>
<p>teriwtt, I live quite close to your daughter and have been using Peapod for several years.
On occasion I use Whole Foods, but it is very expensive. The nearest Trader Joe to your daughter is inconvenient to get to by public transportation and the parking lot is a nightmare. If she and her roommate were to shop together and wanted a Trader Joe, tell them to go to drive to the one in Cambridge directly over the BU bridge. (I get produce there.) She is a few T stops from Shaw’s, a large but not particularly inexpensive supermarket. My downstairs neighbors periodically do large shoppings at Shaws and have their purchases delivered. They like that better than Peapod because they choose their own meat, produce, etc.<br>
I like Peapod, but you have gotten some good advice about it in other comments. (I got frozen salad in my last order.) I love the convenience because I’m in a third floor walkup and the delivery people bring everything up the stairs. I have an order coming tomorrow and am thrilled to not have to deal with climbing and sliding over mounds of ice to get my groceries out of the car.
I find I save money, no impulse buying. I use newspaper coupons. Stop and Shop (the Peapod supermarket) has it’s own brand of organic food which is very reasonably priced. I buy $100 worth of goods at a time and don’t remember the last time I ended up paying delivery because of email specials I receive. I buy gallons of milk, OJ, canned goods, cleaning supplies-anything heavy. I save the most money by compiling my order on a Wednesday and submitting it for a delivery day within the next several days. I take advantage of the specials offered that week and the reduced prices are locked in. The new weekly specials are posted on Thursday and I add those to my order. You can change items in your basket until about 24 hours prior to delivery, so if I get it on Friday or a few days after, I have taken advantage of the specials for both weeks. That works very well for me.</p>
<p>Marian, you confirmed my fears and concerns of Peapod…how can you possibly have someone else handpick your produce or other fresh food ? </p>
<p>Whenever I enter the produce dept. I buy what looks good and what I need, but I look over the produce for marks, bruises and other things that make it worthy or not. You can’t trust a stock person to look over each avocado to see it meets your standards…especially with the prices they charge</p>
<p>It is probably fine if you are ordering Tide, cereal and canned tomatoes, but when it comes to items you need to examine, I would only trust my daughter to do my shopping in my absence</p>
<p>secondspring - you added an important observation… my daughter is also on a third floor walk up, which makes it more of a hassle.</p>
<p>She had nothing but griping in regards to the piles of snow mounds today after this weekend’s snow. She originally was going to take the T to Logan, but realized there was no way she was going to be able to maneuver down the streets with her luggage to the stop. Actually she fell over one mound trying to get to the cab.</p>
<p>Well, in my area, where Peapod is run in cooperation with the Giant, I never had any evidence that they deliberately sent out bad food. I used to order apples and oranges from them, and I never received damaged ones. So I think that it’s likely that someone actually looked at the apples and oranges when selecting them. I think the problem with black bananas was a matter of ignorance. (Someone should have told the drivers to keep bananas in the cab of the truck.) Also, I think that Peapod has trouble keeping the interiors of its refrigerated trucks at temperatures above freezing when the temperature outside is below freezing. That could account for the frozen salad that the other poster mentioned. I had the same problem once, but I had forgotten about it. </p>
<p>For me, though, the main annoyance with fresh food was that you had no control over its expiration date. So basically, I didn’t buy food items from Peapod that have short shelf lives (such as salad vegetables) unless I intended to use them within a day after arrival. And occasionally, I received dairy products that were rather close to their expiration date.</p>
<p>Of course, another concern about produce is that when you go to the supermarket, you can change your mind about which items to buy if the whole display of something doesn’t meet your standards. Yesterday, when I was in the supermarket buying salad ingredients, I bought cucumbers instead of peppers because the peppers looked wrinkly and old. But in the same situation, Peapod would have sent me peppers because that’s what I had ordered.</p>
<p>Peapod DOES do a good job of keeping frozen food frozen. They do it with dry ice. </p>
<p>I have to say that although Peapod was essential to survival while I couldn’t get to the supermarket with a broken leg, I never used it again after I got to the point where I only needed a cane. Even though it took a long time for me to bring all the grocery bags into the house with only one free hand, I preferred being able to make last-minute decisions, to choose my own fresh food, and to not have to plan in advance to be home for the deliveries.</p>
<p>It sounds like Peapod varies significantly from place to place. How long in advance did you have to order, Marian? In my city, I just need to order by midnight in order to get my food the following afternoon. I sometimes order produce through Peapod, and I sometimes pick it up at another, more expensive market if I want to pick out my own. I’ve never had a problem yet with the produce Peapod shoppers pick out, but sometimes I like to get my own. On the expiration date question, I’ve actually had the opposite experience than Marian. I can never get products with expiration dates so far in advance at the supermarket! That’s one thing that I love about Peapod: my milk is half the price than the local store and lasts twice as long! Peapod definitely isn’t perfect. For me, the local store is very expensive, and the nearest normal (non-specialty) grocery store is not in a safe area. The closer, expensive store is about a thirty minute walk from my apartment, and I can’t walk there and back with all of my groceries in the extreme hot or cold.</p>