SAN ANTONIO – What began as a pandemic necessity has now become a weekly routine for many families: curbside grocery pickup, home delivery and mobile app ordering.
Purchasing certain items in-store is often cheaper than opting for curbside pickup.
However, how much extra are shoppers paying for the convenience of skipping that in-store visit?
San Antonio residents Karla Skates and her husband, Jorge Mata, have been tracking the cost difference between curbside orders and in-store shopping. What they found may surprise you.
“We use it weekly,” Skates said. “Every week I sit down, typically on a Saturday night, do our grocery list, load it up, and then pick it up on Sunday.”
These curbside trips have become routine. According to Skates and Mata, the curbside service has almost become a “necessity.”
Mata remembers trying curbside pickup when it was first introduced in San Antonio.
“I started using it when it first came out,” he said. “And it was really just out of curiosity because it was a brand new concept that I’d never really seen or heard of. And from there, prior to the pandemic, it was one of those things that we did on and off.”
He said just “trying out” curbside changed to “depending” on it during the pandemic.
“It started during the pandemic,” Skates said. “It was challenging to go in-store —at the time we had two small children — and it was not easy to go grocery shopping with two small kiddos under the age of 2.”
Mata agreed, adding that curbside became less about novelty and more about efficiency.
“This actually saves a lot of time,” he said. “It became a lot more about convenience and speed versus just doing it out of novelty.”
Of course, convenience comes at a price.
Skates and Mata said they’ve noticed a consistent — though not massive — markup when using curbside services compared to shopping in-store.
“There’s a little bit of a markup to use curbside service,” Mata said. “And that’s reflected in each individual grocery item. But, when we go in the store, especially when we take our child with us, it is typically a lot less expensive using curbside because we’re not susceptible to those impulse buys.”
During their most recent shopping trip, Skates said the estimated total via curbside was $141.14.
Using the store app, she compared their curbside bill to what it would have been in-store, which was $139.79.
So, on this trip, they could have saved $1.35 by shopping in-store
Even on individual items, small price differences can add up. For example, Skates showed us that a 24-count of string cheese costs $7.34 on the curbside app, compared to $6.99 in-store — a 35 cent difference.
Still, she said the benefits of curbside outweigh the added cents.
“For us, it’s worth it,” she said. “We save time and have the convenience instead of spending hours at the grocery store fighting crowds and end up spending more money because of the impulse buys.”
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