> If so, what happens when, say, your apples come bruised?

Me: these apples are bruised

Tesco man: sorry sir, let me refund that straight away. And keep the apples, you could make a pie with them.

Though in five years of online grocery shopping I've only returned a couple of items. The apples have made it all the way unbruised from New Zealand after all, four more miles is nothing.

So in other words, if your apples show up bruised, you're still stuck with bruised apples? And then you have to wait for the new unbruised ones to arrive?

That sounds like a much worse experience than simply going to the market and picking out unbruised apples.

Do you really think that getting a few bruised apples once or twice a year, if that, and keeping them for free when this happens until the replacement comes, is so unacceptable that you need to be going to the grocery store each and every time to handpick and carry carefully your apples back home?

Or are you just being hyperbolic?

Are you asking if I'd rather pay less and get quality fruit every time, or pay more and potentially not get quality fruit every time?

Tough call, but I guess I'd rather pay less and get quality fruit every time.

Shopping takes maximum 45 minutes and I like browsing the different cuts of meat at the market and/or my local butcher.

You tell them, and they refund you, and they look into their operations and figure out how they let bruised apples slip into a customer's order so the problem can be remedied.

But you're still left with bruised apples.

Had you gone to the market you would not have bruised apples.

I value my time more than I value not experiencing the pathetically infinitesimal trauma of the occasional bruised apple (something I experienced not once in the 6 years I lived in Santa Clara and had 100% of my groceries delivered).

And yet somehow, FreshDirect's managed to stay in business since 2002.

When the options are taking the L to Whole Foods vs ordering Fresh Direct, both options suck. Fresh Direct just sucks slightly less.

This is relatively common in the UK. Online grocery shopping is very much mainstream. All of the major supermarkets offer it, plus Ocado which is online only (and the best).

For the Ocado-deprived, the main feature that makes me stick with Ocado is that when I forget to make an order, they pick a set of products based on my purchase history, and delivery it at my usual fixed weekly slot anyway.

It is predictable enough (and with options for "always include" and "never automatically include") that we quite often don't bother adjusting the order.

My grocery shopping have never been less stressful.

We've been using Ocado for the last few weeks as my wife was finding it too much hassle to go to the supermarket with a toddler. It's freed up a lot of time and the service and quality has been excellent.

I hadn't noticed that they help you to remember your order and try to deliver what you normally have. Is this automatic then. What happens if you are out of the country for a couple of weeks?

Is this kind of service not common in the US then? It seems to be massive in the UK now.