About a year ago, our local Loblaws underwent a massive renovation, transforming into a Loblaws ‘Great Food’ location. The results debuted a swankier, food-market-ier experience, and even resulted in a smaller store footprint since they did away with most of their big household department (for the record, I don’t miss being able to buy towels alongside my bananas). At their grand re-opening in October, they went all out, even featuring live music among a plethora of great samples and excited smiles. I didn’t think grocery shopping could get any better.
But now they’re launched the most exciting feature yet — Click and Collect, their online grocery shopping service. I’m hooked.
I’d signed up to their mailing list in-store to receive $20 off my first order (yep, my email address is worth $20 in free groceries!!) and they gave me a brief overview of how it works. Before I could even try it, a friend shared her positive experience and gave me some tips, and then I set off to experience it myself.
I love grocery shopping. Love, love, love it. It’s part of a weekly ritual: make tea, brainstorm meal plan, make grocery list, go shopping, get some retail therapy. And so I wasn’t sure how I would feel about removing the physical shopping cart from the equation.
But since I also love online shopping, this is a formula that works.
Groceries + Online Shopping = Win.
And so I built our meal plan on Friday morning, created the list, then made the difficult trip upstairs to the office so I could grocery shop. I easily found everything I was looking for; you can both browse or search for items by aisle/category, keywords, sales, and more. It’s a clean user experience, easy to navigate, and fairly quick. You can even turn on whether you’ll accept substitutions, like “If you don’t have kale, give me collard greens” or “If you don’t have my preferred brand, substitute a different one.”
I scheduled our pick-up for between 7-9 p.m. on Friday evening so Hubs could swing by on his way back from baseball. When he arrived in the bright red parking spots, he called the number on the sign, our green bins were picked up, and groceries were brought out to the car. It took about 15 minutes, with the employee apologizing/explaining it was busier than expected. He paid for it from behind the wheel and I even got all my PC Plus points (I’m addicted to those, too).
And all it cost was $3. The busier pick-up times, ex. Saturdays, are still only $5. Five bucks to save me from cursing under my breath or “accidentally” running in to the slow people with my shopping cart? Double win. The only downside was the wait. We’re pretty efficient shoppers, so that time plus the learning curve of finding everything online was a bit longer than anticipated. But despite the wait, I’d give it a try again. I also mis-ordered a few things (2L instead of 4L milk for #BabyBabiak, honey dijon instead of honey mustard), and forgot a few things (cucumber, cherry tomatoes) so I popped by quickly on Saturday anyways. I figure this week we’ll break even with time, but hopefully the next order will be more of a savings.
I feel really lucky to have the only store in Ottawa with this service and only hope more people take advantage of it so it doesn’t disappear. It’s one more reason to move to Barrhaven, friends…
