On the tour
On Wednesday I was invited down to the Peapod Warehouse along with other thrift and mommy bloggers for a tour of their operations.
Peapod is an online shopping option for busy people. It is the area’s leading Internet grocer, serving in the metro areas of Boston, Chicago. Hartford. Milwaukee, New Haven, Providence, Washington DC, Suburban New York City, as well as in other surrounding suburban areas.
The company claims that it has made over 13 million food delivers. That’s a lot of groceries!
We were led up stairs into the Peapod Warehouse which is actually the second floor of the Stop and Shop warehouse. This is where the main operations take place for orders in the local area. It was clean and well organized.
This is how the ordering works:
You go to the website and create an account.
You order your groceries from Peapod. They carry various sizes of products so you need to know what size you usually order.
Orders for the next day close at midnight. Once the order has been closed, it is sent to the “shoppers”. The shoppers are employees who wear these computers on their wrists that look a lot like something a Borg would wear. From these computers they know what to get. They fetch the item by going down rows that look remarkably like a regular grocery store and scan everything that goes into the customer’s bin.
Looks just like a regular grocery store aisle.
Meat orders are sent down to the Stop and Shop meat department and they are prepared and packed on the spot by 9:00 am for each order. By the end of each day, the entire meat section will be empty.
At the end of the day, these meat shelves will be empty.
From what I saw the produce looked fresh and they had a large selection of items. It was noted that if they didn’t have an item in stock, you had the option of getting a substitute and even if that substitute was more expensive you would pay for the lesser priced item.
Nice Looking bananas.
The website provides filters if you need have certain dietary needs. You have the option of viewing all items that are peanut-free for example.
The orders are packed into bags and are then packed into large green plastic shipping boxes which further protected them during deliver. Ice packs are also used in the shipping boxes to keep the food cool.
These are the delivery bins.
Deliveries are monitored online. You are given a window of when the delivery will come and if something comes up, you can call and move the delivery to another time. Late deliveries are tracked and we were shown the tracking of one delivery that was 2 minutes late. It was flagged in the computer as late, but hey, late is late right?
All of the items are fully guaranteed and can be returned if you are not satisfied with them. The prices are competitive. You do pay a delivery fee.
Peapod matches the sales at Stop and Shop and also takes coupons! If you give the driver of your order your coupons, then your account gets credited for the amount.
Peapod does not currently deliver to my location and I’m not sure I would order my weekly groceries from an online service. Sometimes a lot of what I buy comes from dented cans that are marked down or bakery or vegetables that have been reduced.
But these are the times when I would definitely use an online grocery system:
• When we go on vacation, we usually rent a house for a few days (we have to pay for two hotel rooms when we travel just because there are so many of us) . I would love to have this option available to order the food we needed for our vacation and have it delivered after we arrived. Do you know how much leg room that would free up in our SUV if we did that?
• If I was laid-up due to illness or surgery. (It does and has happened) What a great service to have groceries delivered to your house.
• If you are elderly or if you know someone who is elderly and who can’t get out. – Again, this is a great service and also a thoughtful gift.
• Students – for all of those college students who live in cities, I would think that this service would be nothing short of life saving.
NH.com
Lessons Learned from the Flock 
I have a friend who has used Peapod off and on for a long time. She lives in Boston, no car, and the nearest supermarket is a pain to get to. She loves not having to lug groceries on trains, buses.
I use it now and then… mostly when I’m buying an unusually high number of items or lots of bulky or heavy items that would require me to make a million separate trips back and forth to the car (and across the lot, and through the courtyard, and up the stairs, and… well, you get the idea). The Peapod guys tend to carry it all in with one or two trips, though they arrive at the door weighed down like pack mules when they do.
I never thought about setting up an account to delivery groceries for a vacation destination. That’s brilliant!
I really like the service, and just wish they had a broader selection (not everything in the regular stores are in the Peapod store). Oh, and if they offered same-day delivery too, I would pretty much never set foot in a grocery store again. 😉
Great to hear your comments, They don’t deliver in my neck of the woods but I also adore the vacation delivery idea (how much space we would save in the car!)
Wendy
I live in astoria ny and use them when i need heavy items and when the weather is bad. they are good. everything is quality and they come on time. i am glad they are available in my area.
It’s always nice to hear that a service is useful, thanks for letting us know about your experiences with Peapod.
Wendy
You’ll also be in a better position to shop around for bargains.
Here are some reasons why online grocery shopping is considered to
be cheaper in comparison to real time shopping. Online shopping is
the demand of todays modern time.
Same here – we used it this week and saved $50 bucks compared to last week’s in store groceries because I had a better sense of what I was buying – and we got fancier stuff than we did with the other grocer!
Once firearms were introduced though, the Andalusian was used by Royalty and became known as
the Royal Horse of Europe. There are plenty of
good Andalusians to choose from. The Andalusian was a major influence on the Lipizzaner breed in the 1500’s.