Samhain Thanksgiving Moon
Today I needed to find a rack of lamb, something our local butcher at Festival Foods said she “…couldn’t get until the week before Christmas.” After assuring me that neither her suppliers nor any local grocers stocked such an exotic piece of meat, she concluded with sorry I couldn’t help you.
Well. I got on the web, went to the Byerly’s website, ordered a rack of lamb, 2 in fact, some italian sausage and a nice brie. Then I noticed they would deliver. I chose that option and will get those items plus a couple more delivered to our home on Saturday morning. Food, delivered. From a grocery store. I knew it was happening, but I’d never tried it before. We’ll see how it goes.
The whole process was over ten minutes after the Festival butcher said she couldn’t help. The problem for brick and mortar operations is their vulnerability to better service available with little or no friction on the part of the buyer. Who knows, I may buy food more often this way.
A trip over to Byerly’s in Maple Grove would take an hour to an hour and a half plus. This accomplishes the task with literally no travel on my part. That’s a good deal and worth money, both in time and car cost. Yes, there’s a delivery fee of $10, but that’s less than the trips cost to me.
Not sure I would ever want to buy groceries entirely on line, but I might. I’ve just never done it until now. Maybe it makes the most sense. The cyber links we have at our fingertips are changing the most mundane tasks in ways we couldn’t have predicted. Some good, some bad.
By that I mean some that make things work better for us, others make things work worse for us. The latter group includes, at a minimum, the invasive intelligence gathering carried out by not only the NSA but by corporate interests of all sorts, not just google.
