When I heard that Instacart was coming to Portland, and it offered fast delivery services similar to now the now defunct Kozmo, I was pretty excited. Finally, Portland is not a second class city while other cities like New York, Chicago, Boston, San Francisco, Seattle etc. get the new modern services to bring urban convenience with technology together.

I recently decided to try out their grocery delivery services, so here is my review of Instacart in Portland. Would you like to try Instacart yourself?! If you don’t mind, would you consider using my referral link? As long as you spend $10, your first delivery will be free and you get a $10 credit on top of the free delivery.

Delivery Service All Grown Up

If you were not around or aware of Kozmo, it was a service I remember fondly where after placing an order on the internet for items like milk or ice cream or a movie rental, it would be delivered to your front door within an hour.

As probably all of us have experienced, there are many a time you start putting together a meal and find out that the milk is no longer good or you’re out of lemon juice, or have a craving (say, ice cream, chocolate, mac and cheese).

Then, comes the internal struggle- do you take the time to change out of your comfortable pjs/loungewear that you have decompressing from your hard weekdays and make yourself travel to the store, deal with going down the aisle, and the checkout process… or do you just do without?

Then add if the weather sucks because it’s cold and raining, or even snowing… I seriously used Kozmo probably every week. And then, with the burst of the dot com bubble, Kozmo went away, to the sadness of many college students and young professionals.

Instacart aims to provide that second answer once again, but has expanded the offerings from the small goods that Kozmo had to now, in the Instacart incarnation, include partners such as Whole Foods, Costco, and Uwajimaya, as well as additional local stores to come. Update: Instacart has now added Safeway, Natural Grocers, and Green Zebra Grocery.

It’s delivery service all grown up.

So once again, you can go online and order through their website so you can continue doing what you need to at home (be it watching the kids or writing work documents or trying to edit photos for your blogposts). And, this is important, in one shopping and check out process you can combine multiple stores.

You can shop bulk, and shop organic, and shop those special Asian goods that are hard to find, all in one sitting, literally!

Using the Instacart Website

I tried this Instacart service out myself this past week. After all the gastronomic fun of Feast, I decided I wanted to try to do a juice cleanse. This time, I’m all about making it easier for myself. So I borrowed my friend’s Vitamix so hopefully it would not be an 8 hour ordeal again to make all my juices from scratch. I decided to try Instacart, so I wouldn’t have to run to multiple grocery stores like last time trying to gather all the ingredients. By combining what was available from both Costco and Whole Foods, I was able to order everything without the hassle of driving across town to hit both stores.

This is especially a bonus for me as I am car-free – I don’t own a car. I do belong to car sharing services like Zipcar and Car2Go, but similar to how you would be out the cost of gas, that meant I would even in getting in the car and before I got to the store, already spent money for the car rental.

Starting up was extremely easy- just enter a zip code to verify Instacart works for your area, a first and last name, email address, and password. I loved how they made such a low barrier to get through before I could start looking around the website to see what they had.

As I was shopping for my various ingredients. there was a little work in that since I didn’t see the packaging right in front of me, I didn’t know how many apples were in the bag, or how many celery stalks in a 4 ounce bunch. But since I was already at home, based on the packaging of each ingredient, I was able to just open another internet browser tab to calculate via a Google search based on Oz weights or such that were given.

This is maybe a work in progress- sometimes they have information, and sometimes not. When information is available it’s divided into tabs you have to click on to see what’s there that include general description, nutrition information, and recipes. See the difference between a description from another delivery service I use, Safeway, in description?

However, if you are pretty familiar with packages at your store, this may not be as much of a problem. For instance, I was very familiar with the sizes of the Lysol, tomatoes, spinach, cauliflower, etc already from purchasing them before.

As you add items, you can use a dropdown located in the top, just to the right of the Instacart logo to switch between checking the offering for the same ingredient (such as lime juice for me) in one store vs another in terms of size and price, such as when I was searching for lime juice. This was great for comparison shopping on prices between the stores so I could decide whether I wanted to buy from one store versus another.

Keep in mind though that there is a $10 minimum for each store you want to include in your shopping cart.
    

You can also use the dropdown next to that decide to shop by browsing aisles of that store instead, or based on what is popular. I stuck to the search so I wouldn’t get tempted to buy additional things I didn’t have in mind, which is usually a problem when I grocery shop in person but easy to resist when you’re shopping online.

After I was done, it asked whether I wanted delivery within 1 hour, 2 hours, or other time slots that I could select that were each one hour, either today or tomorrow, between 9am to midnight everyday (including Sunday, which is when I made my first order). For your very first order they offer free delivery, but otherwise the pricing looks like $3.99 for all the slots except the “within 1 hour” slot which is $5.99 if you spend $35 or more on groceries, or $7.99 / $9.99 “within one hour”  if you spend less then $35.

Again, that’s cheaper then if I tried to drive to Costco gas-wise, even if I did own a car. And, certainly my time is worth that I’m thinking! When I use Safeway delivery, their prices for delivery start at $9.95 for an order of $150 or more or $12.95 for less than $150, so I don’t think much of the $35 minimum that Instacart uses at all. It is much harder for me to get to $150 then $35.

I should note though that the delivery fee, and $35 total to reach the lower delivery cost, is also per store. It’s only a few dollars more if your order is less than $35 so as long as you hit the $10 minimum per store you don’t have to buy more. You will get 2 deliveries if you order from 2 stores, even though you are doing one combined but separated shopping cart.

In comparison, Safeway can only do same day delivery if you order essentially 6 hours ahead of the delivery schedule, which is not as responsive as Instacart either. I also have let my Costco membership expire, so it was great that I was still able to save money by purchasing some Costco bulk goods without having to pay for a membership myself.

Alternately, if you think you might use Instacart’s delivery service a lot, you might consider getting a membership instead of paying the delivery fee. The memberships are called “Instacart Express” and are $10/month or $95/year, and with that membership all deliveries except the “within 1 hour” one are free as long as you spend $35.

It also looks like they have a way to share your shopping cart so that can be a help in bringing up your order total.  I did not try that feature, though if you are doing that it looks like you have to define it as a shared cart at the beginning before you add items.

Also, if you don’t see something listed on the website, you can still request it – so for instance even though only the packaged croissants are listed on the Whole Foods site, since I know they almost always have these delicious cheese spinach cheese croissants at the store, I could have asked for that using that form.

 

During checkout you can select whether you want substitutions on certain items and what substitution item you would want. This is more flexible then Safeway as I can actually search and select whether I want to for instance, substitute garbanzo beans with a can of black beans instead. You can add extra text to help them get to you, and also add the tip to your order directly at this point.

The Delivery

So after ordering 1:35pm, I waited for my order to be delivered around 2:40-3:40pm. I saw minutes later the names of the personal shoppers who were filling out from my virtual shopping cart into a real shopping cart!

I got calls from both shoppers who wanted to check on whether some of the items they were able to find in the store were acceptable. For instance, whether it was ok that the Lysol pack from Costco has both Ocean and Lemon scent and not just Lemon like it showed online, or at Whole Foods the lime juice they had was a smaller bottle but also cheaper – and thankfully still enough for my juice cleanse recipes! It was nice to know they would contact me if they weren’t sure, and I got to talk to both ladies to answer their questions and explain what I needed just like I had asked a friend to pick up something for the grocery store for me.

Next, I got a text telling me that my Whole Foods delivery was on its way and an estimate of time in 30 minutes, in case I had to make myself presentable. How did they know…

The first to arrive was Whole Foods a little before 3pm, which isn’t that surprising to me as I had ordered less items. It came just as if I had gone to the store myself!

The Costco delivery arrived around 3:20, and was even better than going myself because rather than having to deal with putting things in random boxes in the shopping cart, she had put everything in 3-4 very large reusable shopping bags, and as I emptied those in my kitchen she went and retrieved the second load for me.

When I checked my email, it had the final receipt that showed how much I was charged that deducted items they could not get or that in some cases there was a substitution.

Try Instacart yourself!

I would definitely try Instacart again, especially for heavier items because that is so worth the delivery fee for me, as well as my time in the grocery store. And as a non car-owner, it is much more effective then carrying it from the store myself or temporarily renting a car. I particularly love the access to Costco without having to sometimes deal with the craziness an actual visit might entail!

Would you like to try Instacart yourself?! If you don’t mind, would you consider using my referral link? As long as you spend $10, your first delivery will be free and you get a $10 credit on top of the free delivery.

I did everything on my computer at home, but they also have an app for iPhone, iPad, and Android phones, so in theory I could put together an order while commuting on the train and then come home to ingredients to make dinner, or say apologize to my cats and have a refill of cat food and litter without having to lug the boxes up my steps myself.

Currently the service area for Instacart includes Portland city limits as well as west to Beaverton and Hillsboro, south to Tigard and Lake Oswego and Milwaukie. It does not quite reach Cornelius, Sherwood, Clackamas, Happy Valley, or Gresham yet, and it does not cross over to Vancouver: see the map here. Other cities besides Portland for now are Atlanta, Austin, Boston, Chicago, Denver, Los Angeles, New York City, Philadelphia, San Francisco Bay Area, Seattle, and Washington, D.C, so this is not a small time operation here.

Have you used Kozmo, or Instacart, or other grocery delivery services before? What do like to use, and why?