[chickory3]

> I live in a dense European city and I don't know a single person who orders groceries online.

I live in the U.S. and have almost never used a service like Instacart. Also, when I see the item I’m trying to order in Amazon is fulfilled by Whole Foods, I typically don’t buy it, because of the additional cost.

I’d rather suffer a small amount of inconvenience to save several dollars on groceries, and often it may mean that I may need to order a different brand to pick up a similar item at a local store.

However, I’ll gladly pay a little additional money for Amazon for many other items, because it’s convenient, shipping is included in Prime, and because I can get what I want.

I make the majority of my retail purchases at a supermarket, followed by Amazon online (Prime only), then a very small percentage in-person at Target, Walmart, or a hardware/home supplies store or some random online retailer.

The best I can do to “shop local” is to use a supermarket chain; there is no mom-and-pop to support that isn’t a chain unless it’s a restaurant. I don’t pretend that this is actually “shopping locally”.

I’ve only participated in a boycott once or twice, because there is typically a practical reason for shopping when and where I do- either I need to shop then because I don’t get out much, or there’s a sale with actually lower prices, rather than the frequent “increase the price just to cut it to get you to order more” thing, which I also get sucked into, because I don’t have time to price shop, unless it’s with camelcamelcamel for Amazon.

[wing-_-nuts]

I don't get anything delivered, but I almost exclusively use grocery pick up since so many stores near me went all or mostly self checkout.

Self checkout is fine for small trips, but expecting people to do so for a cart full of groceries is ridiculous. This trend started at walmart but has started moving up the chain to higher priced stores. I just flatly refuse to do the grocer's work for them when I'm not actually saving any money at checkout for doing so.

[sokoloff]

Similar shopping story at our house, but I will observe that Home Depot has made amazing strides into competing with Amazon for delivery of items.

They’ll ship me a $10 <thing my project needs> almost always for free and often next day, sometimes same day. And their prices are competitive in general with Amazon and supplyhouse.com.

I don’t know that it’s a great (or even sustainable) offering from their business angle, but I love it as a consumer and DIYer!

[squeedles]

I believe that HD (and Lowes) massively subsidizes their delivery ops simply because they don't want to cede the space to Amazon. It allows them to under-stock the stores but still maintain a reasonable range of products. However each time I have ordered, they have delivered a ~$2 part via Fedex, at no extra cost to me.

They are a bigger fish than the mom and pop stores but that just means that it will take a little longer for the Amazon Prime monopoly cash flow to devour it.

[adamc]

I dislike Home Depot's politics so much that I make a point of never going there.

In general, I prefer buying local, because it makes my community healthier -- more jobs, directly and indirectly, more options to buy something this afternoon if I really need it. But the reality is that many items are already very difficult to buy. Some of that was true 20 years ago, but it's gotten much worse.

[tstrimple]

This but on the other end. I've had literally thousands of pounds of material delivered for free from Home Depot. Sheet good weight adds up very quickly.