Grocery Shopping At Amazon.com
Amazon launched its grocery service recently and it's got us all nostalgic for a bygone age. Back in the day our ass never had to lift out of the Aeron to get produce, DVDs, books, clothes, art, exotic pets, and a human toe delivered right to our office by a scooter messenger. A six pack of Oly and a head of lettuce please. Because we fucking can! Then we were all fired and a few rich guys got slightly less rich.
Amazon's trying it again, though. We were going to order a head of lettuce as one of our test cases, but it turns out they're not offering produce. Homegrocer.com they're not, and that's probably for the best. No heads of iceburg, but they do have a selection of dry non-perishables and various other household powders; granola, tea, flour, salt, that kind of stuff. Oddly they even have canned goods which must be a bitch to ship. If your typical food drive will accept it, they seem to have it, even if you're the kind of idiot who drops off a single grocery bag full of $300 worth of organic goods. No Oly, though.
Since a head of lettuce wasn't available Seattlest decided to buy something we might actually purchase at QFC instead. Coffee. It seems like it's been getting better and more expensive lately at the grocery. Gone are the $6.99 pound of beans. Seattle's Best isn't even carried in grocery stores since very recently. $10.99 is about the average price for 12oz of beans, even for organic and fair-trade varieties, which seems kind of high to Seattlest. Is this what America pays for a cup of mud in the morning? Let's see if Amazon can help us out here. The selection is comparable to what's in the bins at the grocery store, with a bunch of Folgers thrown into the mix. Pura Vida whole bean coffee seemed to be what we were looking for: Their website has a bunch of friendly keywords like "organic," "fair trade" and even "at risk children" and it's done up in a nice REI "I care about stuff" earth tone pallet with a bunch of nativey hand-drawn elements. That'll do.
A good thing about shopping on the internet is that you can check the evilness of the brand right there in another tab. Of course results 2-2,000,000 could be about how Pura Vida drafts African infants into drugged-out, right-wing murder gangs Ala Charles Taylor, but we'd never know it because we never went below their earth-friendly site in the result set. In 2006 due diligence is one click.
You gotta do it, though. You gotta do your research. You don't want to buy a chicken from some unknown poultry slaughterer who bespoils millions of acres of the Heartland just because you didn't do your one click.
So Pura Vida seemed ok and we selected their Cafe Kilimanjaro 12-Ounce Bags (Pack of 3). One 12oz bag would have been preferable, actually. There's only so much space in Seattlest's freezer what with all the frozen burritos, popsicles and Trader Joes entrees that somehow seemed much more exciting in the store than they do at dinner prep time. Amazone makes you get three and their price for the three is $20.46. Yes, it's a 30% savings over what we'd pay at QFC, but we gotta subject ourselves to the bulk tax that's been making our roads roll so efficiently these past ten years and there's still shipping to consider. Amazon wanted about $20 to get us our beans next-day. No thanks. Seattlest is standard ground folk. Always have been, hopefully won't always be. To ship and handle our beans from wherever the hell they keep them to our home in Seattle it costs us $6.72. That's probably more than we'd spend on a trip to the grocery store whether we drove our broke down '88 Saab or took a diamond-encrusted executive rickshaw. It's twelve blocks away. We won't use any gas in the Saab by having the stuff shipped to us, but is that gain worth more than the energy that's consumed by whoever delivers our beans?
Anyway, the grand total for three bags of organic coffee came to $27.18. Plus we bought a book, which we can't go to Amazon.com for any reason and not do.
The price difference between this Amazon coffee experience and what we'd get at our local retailer is negligible, but our ass never had to leave the chair (which is no longer an Aeron, by the way) and we were able to look into the company we were buying from. We're a little uncertain as to the quality of our experience, though. Did we just have a Wal-Mart moment or can we construe Amazon.com as a local and progressive retailer? And what is the point of all this? Didn't we establish in 2000 that online grocery shopping sucked? Check back for Part Two later this week when the beans arrive and are consumed and we try to source our Oly and lettuce from another online provider.
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