This is the third article in a series of articles I have been writing about living life without a car when my car was in the shop for some minor repairs. Last month I shared my experience using Lyft for transportation. This month I am going to introduce you to Shipt.
I first learned about Shipt a couple of years ago when visiting my older sister in Florida. Because I have unique dietary needs, the day I arrived she informed me that we needed to go grocery shopping to make sure we had enough of the right kinds of food. That’s when she pulled out her phone and essentially said, “what should we get?”.
I was a bit confused. Apparently, we weren’t going to go to the grocery store to shop, we were going to “shop” with her phone using Shipt. Shipt is an on-demand grocery shopping service that you access using an app on a smartphone. You select what you want, place an order, someone on the other end claims it, goes to the store and does the actual shopping for you, and when done brings the groceries to wherever you are, usually at your home.
I watched this process unfold utterly amazed. After we filled our online shopping cart with what we wanted, my sister placed the order and selected a delivery time from the list of available times presented, all of which were just a few hours away from the current time. Within about an hour of the delivery time, she received a notification on her phone that someone had claimed her order that included the name and photo of the person who would be shopping for us.
When that person began shopping, she sent a text directly to my sister letting her know and asked her if she wanted to add anything else. As the shopping progressed, if the store didn’t have an item my sister would get a text from the shopper with a recommended substitute that my sister could accept or reject. She even received a photo of the bananas the shopper planned to buy so we could make sure they were as ripe as we had requested.
It took the shopper about an hour to finish shopping. Before she left the store, she sent one last text letting us know her estimated time of arrival. When she arrived, my sister invited her in. The shopper placed the groceries on the counter then quickly went on her way. I could hardly believe it. We went grocery shopping without leaving my sister’s house.
Flash forward a couple years. I am without a car and as luck would have it, I am of course out of food. That’s when I remembered my experience at my sister’s. Time to fire up Shipt so that I could go grocery shopping without a car. Next month, I’ll let you know how it went.
