News: Instacart Will Soon Deliver Wegmans Right to Your Door

Wegmans recently partnered with Instacart, an online grocery-delivery app, to bring your groceries right to you. The collaboration will begin in the suburbs around Washington, DC, and Wegmans plans to expand to other areas later on.

No doubt about it, grocery shopping can be fun. It does, after all, involve food, you know, one of our great sources of joy in life, but it can also be a stressful endeavor. Even if you have convenient transportation and not much traffic to contend with, you may find parking to be elusive.

Then there's working your way through the store itself, contending with what may be hordes of other stressed shoppers, noise, and an overwhelming amount of choices. (What a joy!)

That's only after you have found time in the first place too. If you've ever stopped by a grocery store right after work, then you've probably faced the perils of shopping while hungry allowing you and your budget to end up as unhappy as you are.

If you relate to any of that description of grocery shopping, then Instacart could be the thing you need to make your life significantly easier.

Instacart works from both a mobile app for iOS and Android, as well as from a tab on Whole Food's website. The company delivers customers' orders to their door for an additional fee starting at $5.99.

Wegmans is a small chain but very popular among its customer base. It has 92 stores, and is based on the east coast of the US. Although, Instacart may find it hard to make a profit in the more sparsely-populated suburban areas where a few Wegmans' stores are located.

Instacart's appeal may have been dampened by a few disagreements over worker's pay for its delivery workers. The company temporarily prevented customers from tipping workers in September of last year and replaced that option with a "service fee" going directly to the company itself, but not to its employees.

The company claimed the service fee would give workers a more reliable wage. Though, after a resulting protest from workers, Instacart restored the tip function on the app, but the app left it as an "additional tip" under an unmarked arrow next to the option for the service fee.

In the meantime, workers created flyers to clarify for customers on how to tip on the app or using cash, as well as how to delete the service fee at the same time, which was not clear from within the Instacart app.

On the other hand, Wegmans is doing great. This is the company's 20th year in a row on Forbes' 100 Best Companies to Work For list.

I haven't lived near a Wegmans in a while, but the chain lines up with my own childhood memories. My family went there for things like jars of artichoke hearts, high-quality weird cheeses, and sauces for stir-fry.

Wegmans was the closest chain that contained everything we'd ever want. A delivery service like Instacart would be a relief for people, like my family and me, who needed to travel a certain distance to get to a large grocery store.

So, if you're someone who values what Wegmans offers, but really would like to avoid the hassle of going to and navigating a grocery store, then now, with Instacart you are in quite some luck.

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