I’m Never Grocery Shopping Again!
OK, that’s basically a lie.
But! I’m never grocery shopping the old fashioned way again!
Recently, (June 28th, 2017, to be exact) a Walmart Neighborhood Market opened near my house. This was the most talked about event in recent Stafford County history and, despite opening a few months behind their original predictions, definitely a bar-raiser in the local grocer category.
The store is well-organized, keeps the essentials (read:wine) near the front, offers convenience foods and plenty of standard options and the staff are -wait for it- Friendly. For real. Best WalMart experience of my life. In the two months since the store has opened, I’ve seen no decrease in employee enthusiasm or general product availability. The only thing left to try was the order-online-drive-thru-pick-up service.

So, I did it.

On our way back from vacation, we downloaded the app and set about clicking everything we’d need to get through the week. Dinner ingredients to dishwasher tablets, we searched and selected the items to keep the house running for the next week.
Once complete, we selected our pickup time window and fist-bumped to our success. We wondered how it would go; would they give us dented apples or forget the cat food?
No and no. It was smooth sailing; the added benefit of not spending 37 anxiety-filled minutes selecting the *right* grapefruit is just icing on the proverbial cake.
The following morning, we watched for an email to let us know our order was ready for pickup. The app tracks your progress via GPS, and there was an employee waiting for us when we arrived. His name was Matthew.

Matthew double checked our identity and then disappeared down the yellow-stripe-painted road and reappeared with bins containing our groceries.

He made a point to let us know which items had been substituted and why. (We had checked the box allowing substitutions during our app-shopping checkout process.) The bags with substituted items were marked with a sticker and Matthew made sure we knew that our prices had not increased as a result of the substitutions.
He was also very humble when I repeatedly told him how much my life was improved by his awesome service and how fabulous the drive through pick up really is and how much time he was saving me. Apparently, not enough of us are extolling the virtues of our local conveniences and customer service professionals. He should be immune to these compliments by now, so let’s work on that, folks. Appreciate someone.

We were just about through with our lightning-fast process, when another patron pulled up. FYI: she, too, appeared to be in pajamas. Did I mention you can do this in pajamas? Granted, in my world, there are few things that cannot be accomplished in christmas tree pants, but still…

Just like that…
Everything was loaded up. All I had to do was sign a little electronic do-dad (kind of like what the FedEx guy uses) and we were off!
No squashed bread.
No warm milk.
No broken eggs.
This experience definitely gets a big thumbs up from me and, if you haven’t already, I encourage you to try it soon!
Grocery shopping online is a game-changer.

