groceries

How to find cheap groceries online

If you want to start buying groceries online, we have five sites for you to try out. Few of them are designed well and a couple require up to five days to actually get your groceries. When it comes to buying groceries online, the experience is far from perfect. But I think you might find value in some of these options.

The wide world of groceries

Amazon

Amazon provides the best grocery experience, flat out. It's the service I use. And it's the only service I can fully recommend.

Amazon's grocery store, while still in beta, is designed well. Finding groceries takes just a few seconds. Adding goods to your shopping cart mimics the familiar Amazon experience. And prices are usually better than at my local supermarket. That said, I did find some better deals at wholesale brick-and-mortar stores, like BJ's and Costco.

Delivery is a major concern for most online grocery shoppers. That's where Amazon really shines. Amazon offers its "Free Super Saver" shipping on most products. You'll get your delivery in five to seven days. You can also get bulk items like paper towels in three to five business days with free shipping. If you want your groceries sooner, you'll be forced to pay for it, but Amazon can accommodate just about any time frame you require.

The Amazon grocery shopping experience is convenient, simple, and affordable. I highly recommend it.

AulSuperStore

The first thing you'll notice when you get to AulSuperStore is how ugly the site is. There's a very basic navigation bar in the left sidebar listing all the different grocery pages, but little else. It reminds me of a late Web 1.0 site.

I was generally impressed with AulSuperStore's inventory of groceries. Almost anything you search for will be on the site. But beware that some products I came across were sold out--something I never saw on Amazon. Prices were competitive, but they didn't quite match Amazon's pricing.

Delivery is the biggest issue facing AulSuperStore. You can't expedite shipping. If you're in Upstate New York, New York City, or New Jersey, you'll get your groceries in one day. But if you're in California, don't expect them for at least four days. Such a rigid delivery system will probably turn some people off.

AulSuperStore, while competitive on prices, isn't competitive on anything else. I don't recommend it if you live outside of New York or New Jersey.… Read more

Breadbox-size vacuum preserver seals in freshness

I hate wasting food. Therefore, I shop for groceries with the week ahead in mind. I plan recipes in my head as I stroll through the stands of the farmers market. Some items can wait until the next trip, while some I know will be eaten right away. Unfortunately, this means my shopping is not a precise science. While it is rare for me to let food go bad, sometimes it does happen.

The Automatic Vacuum Sealing Food Preserver from Hammacher Schlemmer can help keep fruits and vegetables fresh a longer time. Measuring 10 inches tall by 19 inches wide … Read more

Grocio makes grocery shopping recession-friendly

Based on the growing size of our layoff tracker and the number of pitches we get starting with "in today's tough economic climate..." it's a great time to launch a service that helps save people cash. Grocio is no stranger to that idea, and lets you comparison shop for groceries without even having to leave the house.

Assuming you're the kind of person who sticks to their shopping list, and nothing but what's on that list this could end up being an incredibly handy service. It plugs into pricing provided by local retailers (including … Read more

The old dry-erase board grocery list gets a facelift

A few years ago, I saw a feature segment about the Microsoft Smarthouse kitchen. The kitchen had virtually every technological feature you would ever need to impress the modern chefs in your life, including a computer that projected recipes right onto your countertop.

Most memorable for me was the ingenious electronic inventory system, that not only would keep track of what you had in your cabinets, but would predict what you were making by what you began removing from the cabinets (in other words, if you took out the flour, sugar, and baking soda, and put them on the counter, … Read more

Where we're biting off a little more than we can actually chew

Today Dave Karp from Tumblr.com tells us why we should all be tumblelogging. Plus we'll get a movie review from Justin and Dave about--brace yourself--Teeth. All this and the new Cleveland show, Indiana Jones 4, and Uwe Boll's craptastic Postal movie. EPISODE 102 Download today's podcast

No PDA? Tattoo your to-dos

Here at CNET, many staffers can't bear the thought of life without their Treo, Blackberry, or iPhone. But for those who haven't jumped into the digital era, here's a new take on the old-fashioned to-do list written on the back of your hand.

With the To-Do Tattoo, you can write out your shopping list and then transfer it to your hand (or other body part of choice), where you know you won't lose it, drop it, or have it unexpectedly run out of battery life at the grocery store.

The To-Do Tattoo comes with an ink … Read more

GroceryGuide: Local food deals and sales database extraordinaire

Now here's a Web app that could save you money on something you're bound to be doing on a weekly basis: buying food. GroceryGuide takes all the data from weekly grocery sales circulars and makes them available online in one large database. Similar to some of the aggregation sites that do this with electronics deals, you can either browse by store, or create a list of three items you'd like to search for from up to two different local stores at a time. If you find an item you like, you can then add it to a … Read more

Press Releases We (almost) Never Finished Reading Dept: Use technology to make a shopping list!

"Ikan is a revolutionary new way of shopping for groceries that will change your life!"

Oh, man, not again. Didn't this pitch die in 1950's newsreels?

But wait, is there maybe more here? Ikan is a scanner you put near the trash in your kitchen. As you throw stuff out, you scan its bar code. Then the service makes a list that it can auto-transmit to the grocery store. Very 1950, no?

People are going to keep banging their heads against the grocery business. But it's a very tough market (sorry). Margins are so incredibly … Read more

Urban grocery track

So everyone's on the BYOB Bandwagon these days ~ not exactly a NEW concept...(oh, and that's Bring Your Own Bag to the supermarket, etc.). But let's step back and look at this...odds are most people are using those just to put them into their cars and drive them home. So sure we're saving the use of plastic bags, but they are still DRIVING.

What about those who walk? There are old-school options far more practical than just the usual bags...I think of the little old ladies when I was living in Milan, Italy, who … Read more