[camelNotation]

I would pay for a personal shopper who is working for me, towards my interests, and not in the interests of any particular store.

We can't trust store employees to give us the best products because not all grocery items are created equal. An apple is not just an apple. There are good apples and bad apples. I don't trust someone whose incentive is to sell all the apples to give me a good apple when they can give me a bad apple that won't otherwise sell.

I also don't like that a store employee only works for one store. I would rather pay a personal shopper to go to grocery store #1 and then grocery store #2 if necessary to get the brands I prefer. Having someone in grocery store #1 tell me "Brand X is out of stock, so we substituted brand Z" is not preferable.

[Larrikin]

This was always my issue with using a service provided by the store. But after talking to friends and finally being convinced to try it turns out that:

Grocery store workers are almost never stock holders in the company that are trying to push up their profit margins at all cost in spite of the consumer. Grocery stores either have multiple competitors in an area or face an area where it will become a food desert, people will prefer a grocery store but their existence is no way guaranteed. They also can get their money back on products that didn't sell in certain cases. It's almost always in their interest to get you the best product.

Grocery store workers tend to fall in the category of teenagers getting their first job that aren't trusted with anything meaningful, slackers trusted with the same responsibilities as the teenagers, and butchers/produce specialist/etc that take their job extremely seriously that care about what they do. It was surprising at first talking to them over years but there alot of people that take their role in the food chain extremely serious and really love what they do.

The majority of food is mass produced, including the produce, so most stuff you have atleast a week left to consume if it's out on shelves.

Getting something you didn't want usually ends up being as likely as getting something yourself you didn't want. It's almost always an oversight from someone that is actually intimately familiar with the items because that's their job.

This is in stark comparison to a delivery app employee that really only cares about getting as many deliveries in a day as possible. If you get a single bad onion, they don't care so long as the person getting their shirt from Wal-Mart rates them well and they can just work for multiple services averaging out their numbers. Plus you aren't going to be a dick and not tip them right, what with the whole culture surrounding how you have to tip anyone doing a delivery for you?