One of the biggest inconveniences some people have during the week is finding time to go to the grocery store to pick up food for the week. After a long day of work, the last thing some people want to do is drive to the grocery store and shop around for an hour picking out food. Luckily the Peapod service, run through Giant and Stop and Shop offer groceries delivered to your door.
This Peapod service appeals to many people who just don’t have the time in the week to go grocery shopping for themselves or their families. The appeal of Peapod is obviously the convenience of it. People can just go online, pick out their fresh groceries to be delivered at a time that works for them. It’s simple. They are delivered to your door and everything.
Personally being a college student here at Loyola University Maryland, the food is awful. Many students agree with this, and I believe this is why I have frankly heard of Peapod. I did not know about Peapod till I got to school and when I found out, my roommates and I immediately started ordering. Being at a school with a primarily food court style, the food just gets tiring eating the same things again and again. With Peapod, I can order fresh food to be delivered and prepare meals the way I like.
Yes, you still have the inconvenience of having to cook, but you are eating the food you want, it is good quality, and it is surprisingly cheaper. At school here, the prices are a little out of hand. Companies should be giving breaks to college kids, realizing most don’t have any income coming in. Instead, here at Loyola University Maryland prices are too high. Going into Iggy’s the local food court/market I wanted to buy a gallon of orange juice for the week. It was almost $9.
Also with Peapod, being an underclassmen usually means you don’t have a car with you on campus. It would be extremely challenging trying to get to the grocery store. None of the local buses stop there. Another thing would be time. No college kid wants to say, “hey I think I’ll go grocery shopping today.” Grocery shopping is just something people despise which is why Peapod is such a great service for people who know about it.
But there is also a downside to it. With Peapod, there is an extra $10 or so that is added on to your checkout chart for the delivery charge. This is something I could see why people are against it. Along with this, in some online reviews, people have complained about the delivery people showing up late by sometimes a couple of hours. This might not seem like much, but if you have somewhere to be this could prove very problematic. If they improved time management and reliability there company could be a lot better. Also, it is tough to get the times you are looking to have your delivery made. I have personally gone online hoping for a particular delivery time and it not be available. Even some case people have found the food to not be fresh.
In general, Peapod is a great service that has potential to be a convenient service people can rely on for a long time.
http://ambler.patch.com/articles/giant-launches-peapod-by-giant-for-groceries-delivered-to-your-home
http://www.washingtonian.com/articles/bestbites/511.html
http://news.cnet.com/Can-Peapod-turn-naysayers-into-believers/2008-1082_3-256010.html
The Peapod Service is definitely a valuable service to many people across the country. Since it makes grocery shopping more convenient. I feel that although it many people don’t have time to go shopping, they also do not have the time to fidget around on a computer to find what they want. This can be more time consuming than actually going to the store. I still think Peapod gained a competitive advantage by becoming the first successful online grocery shopping company, which is why they can also mark up their prices on groceries. Another downside to using Peapod that I know from personal experience and read reviews on was that the fresh produce weren’t so fresh, some even expired. In order to fix this Peapod needs to work towards either getting the product to the customer in a more timely fashion before a product expires, or by decreasing their inventory so that they order produce when they are ready to sell it. This problem can be resolved using supply chain management because they know what the problem is and need to test different solutions to perfect this online shopping website. If they can resolve this problem before a competitor does, they will be ahead of the game and gain many more customers.
ReplyDeletehttp://www.yelp.com/biz/peapod-gaithersburg