Trader Joe's already delivers; so does Safeway. However, I'm surprised that the delivery fee is so cheap ($3.99 for sameday). Safeway currently charges $4.95 for delivery in a 4 hour window the next day.
Does Instacart use TJ's/Safeway's prices, or do they set their own prices for each item?
I use Instacart because the experience is better. Their prices are roughly a 5% markup over Safeway (and now, I assume, Trader Joe's), which amounts to a few dollars on my typical grocery order.
That's more than made up for in the convenience factor. There's a huge difference between being available to take a delivery during a 1-hour window today vs a 4-hour window tomorrow. For 1 hour, I can do highly interruptible activities (checking email, tidying the apartment, reading a book, etc.) without a significant negative impact on my overall productivity. It's a lot harder to find a 4 hour block of activities that offer the same kind of flexibility.
I hadn't heard about that before, so I looked it up. I couldn't find any TJ delivery site, except an unofficial one from 2011, but it looks like they got sued by TJ.[1] The official TJ website says that they don't sell online.[2]
IIRC, Trader Joe's has delivery but not online orders. You go to the store to shop, and then they deliver to your apartment. That way you can walk or take the subway even if you buy a lot of groceries.
How would consumer opinion be effected by the change?
I wonder if, as a consumer, I would resent seeing a "service fee" as opposed to seeing higher priced goods. Perhaps, subconsciously, people ignore the item price and are looking for the "fee". In this case, their pricing is their marketing.
I'd be quite interested in whether they A/B tested the two strategies.
I've been passively aware of it, but don't really care - most items are not really egregious. Because Safeway's prices are so volatile with sales and Instacart doesn't seem to really reflect that, it ends up balancing out pretty well (plus, of course, the huge convenience factor)
EDIT: Eridius is correct below. Instacart is just mislabeling their product pricing. The 3 lbs. ribeye shows up as $30 per lb., but is actually $30. I'll bet they are doing the opposite as well (buying 0.5 lbs. of anything will look like an insane deal).
ORIGINAL POST:
I'm looking at some $30/lb ribeye steak right now. The same "extra value" package at Safeway was $10/lb.
Are you sure you're looking at the same thing? I just compared some ribeye "extreme value" steak on Instacart vs Safeway's website. Instacart has the 1.50LB package at $15.74/lb. Safeway has it at $9.99/lb as the Safeway Club price (for some reason it won't show me the non-club price). That's a 50% increase, against Safeway's discounted price.
Except oops, no it's not. Instacart does say "per lb", but if I add it to my cart, the final price is actually $15.74, not the expected $23.61. Which compares to Safeway's club price of $14.99. That's a 5% increase, which seems quite reasonable.
Does Instacart use TJ's/Safeway's prices, or do they set their own prices for each item?