Six weeks ago, grocery shopping from home was efficient for Eliot and Morgan Landes and their two daughters.
The South Philadelphia family would wait just three hours after placing their order to receive their food at their door.
Louise Pugliese in suburban Hatfield, Pa., found the process just as simple. Upon delivery, she recalls, "I signed a piece of paper and that was it."
Now, as home food delivery has gone from a convenience used by a relative few to a boom industry, buying food online has often become a big headache. Demand is so high that some services and markets have fallen more than a week behind. Others, such as Whole Foods, have stopped taking on new customers altogether.
While many see buying food online as a way to avoid contracting the coronavirus, it has become another of the unintended frustrations of the lengthy COVID-19 isolation.
"We've been trying to get a delivery window for a couple of days now and we can't," said Elliot Landes. "I'll probably just make a trip to the grocery store."
Pugliese said something similar.
"I haven't used (the pickup service) lately because of the coronavirus situation," she said. "I'm concerned because the shoppers who shop for you come into contact with so many people that I thought 'I'm just going to do it myself.' "
Widespread problem
The Reading Terminal Market in Center City Philadelphia jumped headlong into the delivery game with third-party company Mercato, but had to jump right out again when the systems became overwhelmed. A service that averaged 50 deliveries per day in early March swelled to more than 8,000 before the plug was pulled on April 14. Curbside pickups continued, however.
Delivery resumed Monday, with limits on the number of customers.
While Mercato continued working with others partners to make deliveries, the surge has left even the most stable operators scrambling to fill orders.
Instacart, one of the leading delivery services, has been at the forefront of the explosion. Earlier this month, chief executive Apporva Mehta said his company was increasing its number of shoppers from 200,000 to 350,000.
"The customer demand we expected over the next two-to-four years," he said, "has happened on the Instacart platform in the last two-to-four weeks."
Exploring other options
The trend lines are clear. As the virus has spread and people have stayed inside, retail sales everywhere have plummeted. After climbing nationwide earlier in 2020, purchases fell 7% the last week of March across the country compared to the same week a year ago, according to figures from Second Measure, a company that analyzes credit card data.
But that decline has been a boon for delivery firms. In a recent analysis, Second Measure found that Instacart has been enjoying record sales. In March, its average weekly sales almost doubled compared with the figure for first two months of the year.
In Philadelphia, the convenience-food delivery company GoPuff had been doing well even before the pandemic. The firm, founded in 2013, has been known as a rare Philadelphia "unicorn," a startup valued at more than $1 billion. But Second Measure found that, post-virus, GoPuff's business really took off _ even though it has stopped taking cash to minimize human contact.
In March, according to data Second Measure data shared with The Inquirer, GoPuff sales in Philadelphia jumped 56% over the previous month, and were 86% higher than the previous year.
The same trend held for the firm nationwide.
In filling orders, GoPuff.com is more corner-store than supermarket. Its eclectic menu of items range from snacks and soda to beer and even adult toys. A $14 order, which included potato chips, Bloody-Mary mix, and tissues, took about an hour to arrive to a home in South Philadelphia on a recent Friday.
Minimized contact
While firms have changed procedures to minimize or eliminate direct contact with customers, their staffs are still in the stores and on the roads. That danger led to a brief strike from workers who continue to demand hazard pay and personal protection equipment from Instacart.
"Aside from not wanting to get sick while shopping, we are petrified of getting our customers sick," said a member of the labor group Gig Workers Collective, who asked not to be identified.
In stores and on the web, tempers are shorter, items more elusive, markets more restrictive. There is a cacophony of posts on social media blaming one side or the other for problems.
A practice known as tip-baiting has even surfaced. That's when a customer promises a sizable gratuity when placing an order, only to modify it when the goods are received. Sometimes no tip is paid.
But there is also some gratitude amidst the ugliness.
"The Instacart driver didn't have a car that could make it up the mountain, so I drove down to meet her," customer Chris Barron tweeted. "Still gave her a 25% tip. These folks are the real heroes. They didn't sign up for this. Be generous if you can."
The sweet spot
In the fight for food, many customers are trying to find the sweet spot when they can go online and get a relatively quick delivery time _ or even a firm date for a delivery at all, albeit days away.
Logging on to place orders seems to work best late at night or early in the morning. In one recent attempt, The Inquirer went online at 11:59 p.m. for a South Philadelphia ShopRite and was able to secure a promise of a delivery _ eight days later.
Another vexing issue: the unavailability of some items and the substitutions that the shopper might make.
Giving a customer Folger's coffee instead of Maxwell House is one thing. But an exchange of dairy yogurt for non-dairy, or the random choice of peanut-laden granola bars might pose a more serious threat for those with allergies.
Joe Corcoran, of Medford, N.J., said he waited days for his order to arrive _ and then found it had too many wrong items.
"They're trying," Corcoran said. "I'm sure they're doing the best they can. But it's just my luck that we encounter this crap on our first try at online groceries."
(Philadelphia Inquirer staff writer Chris A. Williams contributed to this report.)
