
Three quarters of people in the UK now do at least some online grocery shopping - vanilla-almond
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-wales-53840920
======
onion2k
Waitrose is the most expensive high street supermarket in the UK. As an
example, its basic own-store-brand called "Waitrose Essentials" has things
like avocados, 'ironing water', and profiteroles. People write articles joking
about it[1]. It's customers are very much the wealthy middle-class. I have no
doubt that 75% of Waitrose customers do some sort of online grocery shopping,
but I have _serious_ doubts that their poll was representative of the whole of
the UK.

[1] [https://www.studentmoneysaver.co.uk/article/things-
waitrose-...](https://www.studentmoneysaver.co.uk/article/things-waitrose-
think-are-essential/)

~~~
chrisseaton
> 'ironing water'

Ironing water is pure water and is needed in order to not destroy your iron in
areas with very hard water, which is a lot of the southern UK where Waitrose
has most of its customer base. No need for the scare quotes.

~~~
onion2k
I put it in quotes because 'ironing water' isn't a real thing. It's just
distilled water with perfume in. You can use distilled or de-ionised water
from a car accessory store instead which costs about 1/20th the price. My iron
has a note in the manual suggesting the perfume chemicals are bad for the iron
and that I should use plain distilled water instead.

~~~
chrisseaton
If you think it’s not a real thing because you can describe it terms of its
components then does an iced bun not exist because it’s just a bun with icing
on? You can just buy buns in bulk without icing so I guess you think they’re
not a real thing.

~~~
onion2k
If iced buns cost 20 times more than ordinary buns, then yes, but I know that
they don't. I've done extensive research at my local Greggs.

'Ironing water' is a marketing term designed to get people to pay far more for
something than they need to. If it was sold as 'perfumed distilled water for
ironing' I'd take much less issue with it.

I am genuinely surprised to see someone astroturfing for Comfort on HN. :)

~~~
chrisseaton
> I am genuinely surprised to see someone astroturfing for Comfort on HN. :)

I just thought it was a bit snobby to have a pop at old ladies in Waitrose who
just want to keep their iron working well and possibly aren't regularly in a
car shop to pick up a bottle of de-ionised water. And they like things to
smell nice - what terrible people!

I think calling it 'ironing water' is pretty frank and consumer friendly
really. It's water. And it's for ironing. I wish more things were named like
that.

------
dalemyers
The key difference between the US and the UK here is that all the major
supermarkets do their own delivery service. You don't have to rely on third
parties to get things delivered.

~~~
merrvk
Where does Ocado lie in all this? Surely if everyone else offers delivery they
become redundant?

~~~
iso1631
Not really, everyone's offered delivery for years. We've done home delivery
for about 15 years, at various times using Sainsburys, Asda, Tesco, Ocado and
Morisons

Ocado have recently changed to use M&S at the backend

~~~
bosie
> Ocado have recently changed to use M&S at the backend

what does this mean? when was this? I still see a lot of Waitrose products at
the moment.

~~~
evgen
I think the full switch lands at the end of September, but already some of the
Waitrose Essentials items are going out of stock a lot faster than they used
to; the limited depth of stock for these items has served to remind me which
items I purchase regularly that are Waitrose ones and for which I need to see
if M&S has a suitable replacement, so far it has been mixed results for me.
You can also find some M&S items entering the inventory if you scroll down
past your favorites. I am expecting to see a lot more M&S items get pushed as
discounted flash sale items at checkout over the next few weeks so that M&S
can get some of these replacement items marked as favorites in your account.

------
jarym
To think British grocery chains had been pushing online services for many
years and consumer acceptance was growing at a snails pace until Covid hit.

I love using those services especially if it means I can avoided a crowded
store on the weekend. But my wife and I are foodies and we also love browsing
the aisles to see what’s new and tempting. It’s maybe one reason why packaged
food brands are desperate to get onto supermarket shelves - for the exposure.

I wonder how many other societal shifts like that we’re going to see?

~~~
Silhouette
_But my wife and I are foodies and we also love browsing the aisles to see
what’s new and tempting._

That is one advantage to going in person. Another is simply that you can check
the quality of what you're getting to some extent before you commit to buying
it.

For example, the "best before" dates on a lot of fruit and veg have been...
optimistic, let's say kindly... during the recent hot spell. Shopping online,
you just get that somewhat arbitrary indicator. In person, at least you can
see that half the fruit in the punnet is looking past its best even though the
date is still four days away, and perhaps you'll decide not to buy that fruit
today and maybe to get something else instead.

The low-paid store workers rushing around with their over-sized trolleys
trying to collect half a dozen different customers' orders at once while being
monitored for performance are obviously never going to care as much about
picking the fresh-looking fruit or the less fatty piece of meat as the
customer who's going to be eating those things or serving them to their
family.

~~~
robjan
One of the biggest problems with this is everyone always chooses the newest
produce so even if something has plenty of time left it ends up being
rejected. The fix is stock rotation but it takes a lot of effort to ensure
older produce gets sold first while keeping the shelves full.

It probably caused a huge amount of food waste.

~~~
Silhouette
That is certainly a concern, though I am somewhat lacking in sympathy (with
the economic cost to the supermarkets) given that I think this is a problem
they have largely brought upon themselves.

People buy the newest stock they can get because the older stock on the
shelves so often has a pathetic usable lifetime once taken home. When I was a
child, we routinely did one family shop per week in my household. A few
decades later, I consider myself lucky if vegetables I bought from a
supermarket more than one or two days ago are still fit to eat, and in my
household we probably average 2-3 large (but obviously not _as_ large) shops
per week if we're only using supermarkets. For these among other reasons, we
often now prefer to shop locally for fresh food from the specialists nearby
when we have enough time to do the rounds.

Clearly vegetables haven't radically changed; those I buy from local farm
shops and the like still last just fine. But the supermarkets have now
implemented such complicated logistics, presumably because it saves them
money, that there have been horrible consequences for the quality and
longevity of the produce they sell.

I don't know enough about the industry to fully understand the motivations
behind those complicated logistics, but if it's just a race to the bottom to
shave a little off the supply costs and increase the profit margin
accordingly, maybe it's time our government stepped in to regulate in the
interests of avoiding all of that food waste and perhaps other environmental
costs.

------
mantap
There's still some innovation that can be done in this space. The websites for
supermarkets are clunky and the UX could be improved.

When I buy things in a supermarket I use my spatial memory. I know the
physical position of every item, when I walk through the shop I make a series
of tiny decisions about whether I need such and such item.

Grocery shopping via a search interface doesn't do it for me. I always end up
forgetting something because I don't have the experience of walking through
the shop to jog my memory.

~~~
LandR
My supermarket suggests things when I'm about to check out that I buy
regularly that aren't in my basket. In a sort of"have you forgotten this?"
type thing.

------
neverminder
The whole Corona hysteria caused the number of people to buy their groceries
online to explode - government was pushing this message through every channel
they had. "Stay at home, shop online, blah blah". Every online grocery shop
was overwhelmed and had no delivery slots for weeks/months. Before that I was
ordering my weekly groceries from Amazon Fresh for some 7+ years, because I
live in central London and I don't have a car. I've been buying my groceries
in physical store for many months now.

As of 2 days ago Amazon Fresh was still unusable. I tried ordering from them,
but I couldn't check out, because they had no available slots. I was put in a
"virtual queue" and they sent me an email next morning with 1 hour window to
check out. I missed that because I was sleeping. I don't know how long it will
take for online grocery shopping services to recover to what they were, if
ever.

~~~
LandR
This was a problem for a while in my city too but its better now, either
people are using the service less or the supermarket has scaled up how many
deliveries they can do. I just created an order now for an 11:00 - 12:00 slot
tomorrow.

------
LandR
I've been doing online grocery shopping since the pandemic started and it's
been great.

Even once the pandemic is over I'll be sticking to online. I don't have a car
so getting to my nearest supermarket was a 2 mile walk. THis was fine going
but was a pain walking back 2 miles with lots of shopping, especially in the
rain.

Now I can just choose what I want in 10 minutes at the computer rather than 90
mins I would lose on a shopping trip.

------
niffydroid
We use to shop at lidls and Sainsbury's before the pandemic. We'd do the bulk
at Lidl and top up at Sainsbury's. When it hit we physically went to
Sainsbury's as we could get any slots. Lidls in store response was poor and
the store often crowded at choke points. Now that lidl are launching their own
cloud services and delivery in the next 2 years we'd probably start using Lidl
again

------
smcleod
In Melbourne, Australia right now I think the majority of people are having
their supermarkets deliver their groceries each week (we are in level 4
lockdown still), as someone else mentioned and similar to the UK the
supermarkets here have their own delivery services - and the drivers seem a
good bit happier or at least less stressed than Uber/Deliveroo drivers.

------
Brakenshire
This was already happening, but I think the pandemic will drive it through.
Commodity/cupboard shopping will happen online, and fresh meat, vegetables,
fruit, seafood shopping happen locally. Supermarket sites are also hugely
tempting for housing redevelopment, that will happen as soon as footfall
consistently drops below a threshold.

------
dalore
Now if only the butcher did this.

~~~
tiew9Vii
Haven’t been in the UK for a few years but when I did I used
[https://www.musclefood.com/](https://www.musclefood.com/). The meat was high
quality.

Depending how much you spend your local butcher may do delivery to if they
have commercial clients such as cafes, restaurants etc.

------
thinkingemote
Reasonably low quality article based on small sample poll by a supermarket
chain, but I guess it sparks debate.

~~~
iso1631
Annecdotally I haven't seen any more delvieries to my street than pre-covid,
however we moved from 2 deliveries a week of about £75 to one of £150 with
covid (Ocado guarenteed one weekly delivery)

I don't understand why people would want to waste time going to a supermarket.
It's like people who go to shops to buy commodity things rather than just
buying online.

~~~
hotcrossbunny
I had this realization about 10 years ago when I had to do a shop in an
unfamiliar London supermarket on a Saturday. In that circumstance I'm
basically doing their warehousing for them with no knowledge of their layout
at the same time as 100s of other people all moving in their own inefficient
patterns around the space. This is pretty stupid.

------
tonyedgecombe
The title is misleading (of course). The article states _" More than three
quarters of people in the UK now do at least some online grocery shopping,
according to supermarket chain Waitrose."_

