I Hate Grocery Shopping.

This post is sponsored by Woolworths.

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I hate grocery shopping. Shopping centres make me all kinds of anxious. Combine grocery shopping, shopping centres, and shopping with small children, and you have a very unpleasurable situation.

The Most Amazing Man and I are technologically minded kinda people, so we’d already been talking about using an app for our shopping list. One that we could sync between the two of us, to avoid the situation we’ve had before, where we both buy tomatoes and both forget mushrooms and have too much of one thing, not enough of another.

So we tried out the new Woolworths online shopping app, much to the delight of the iChild, who had been bugging me to download it since he first saw the ad on TV.

I am, historically, a huge fan of online shopping. When I was living in Paradise, the closest Woolies was a good 45 minutes drive away. For a couple of bucks, I could order online and have everything I needed delivered to my door.

There’s a ridiculous amount of benefit to online shopping. No dragging small children around the supermarket, kicking and screaming, and saying “Mum, can we have this?” over and over (and over and over). Plenty of time to add things to your list. Very little chance of forgetting anything.

Online shopping with the app makes things that little bit easier again. The app saves the items in your virtual trolley as long as you leave them there. So you can add products as you think of them, wherever you may be. It’s also got a scanner function, so you can just beep the barcode of a product and the app brings it up. You can can link your Everyday reward cards to the app and check your fuel discounts. There’s even a  section for have a look at your personalised specials– products Woolies have flagged just for you, that they know you buy often.

The only thing the app doesn’t do is let you see the prices of your products until after they’ve been added to your trolley. So, say you do a search for ‘soda water’. The app brings up all the available brands for you to scroll through. But it doesn’t tell you how much each individual product is until after you’ve added it to your trolley. Which means comparing prices requires adding all the products to your trolley,and deleting the ones you don’t want.

Anyway. Having done your shopping, you click ‘checkout’ and pay with credit card or voucher. You can choose delivery, or Click and Collect. Delivery feels kind of lazy when you live as close to the shops as I do. So I went with Click and Collect.

The novelty effect of Click and Collect is fabulous. Rocking up to the counter of my local Woolworths and knowing I was soon going to get all my shopping without actually having to go in the store is sheer delight. The customer service woman rolling her eyes slightly and saying “Another one…” when I rocked up to the customer service counter only slightly dampened my enthusiasm. I guess we can say it’s just an example of how many people are Clicking and Collecting.

Online shopping is kind of awesome. It’s a huge time-saver. My inner organised personality (who, evidently, only shows herself on rare occasions) is impressed.

Being able to do boring grocery shopping without any of that anxiety-causing social interaction is like some kind of consumerist heaven.

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This is the bit where I let all you compers know that every time you shop online and place an order before December 22 you will go into the draw to win FREE groceries for a whole year. There are six prizes to be won, and details are here.

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