ilovetotravel1977
DIS Veteran
- Joined
- May 8, 2016
It's Wednesday! Time to save your four offers!
DD and I were discussing this. She's not surprised that this is what they have done. According to the info she had the fees vary from store to store and day/time. People on socials are losing their minds over this. It makes me laugh because instead of dropping the fee back in March they should have just left it in place. It was only $3.Note that Loblaws has now shortened the order closing time so you have 24 more hours to setup your order before it's locked in. The order fee has risen to $5, but only applies to weekend orders apparently (they state it as "popular timeslots" - but scrolling through the calendar that seems to mean Saturday and Sunday at any time). It continues to be waved for non-popular (weekday) orders.
Yeah, starting in June, our Fortinos has the $5.00 charge on weekends, too. I wonder how quickly all the pick ups will dry up when there's a charge again.
From the time they started charging the fee it has been $3. No need to promote it as it was busy pretty much from day one. Within the first 4-5 months of the program they expanded in store space, parking pick up and staff. There was a slight down turn when Walmart started theirs up but it very quickly bounced back to higher than before. I will disagree that they had always been planning to up the fee. Program expansion has been the goal. They have added offsite pick up boxes (ie: Go stations) and had been planning to further develop that side.That's right. I thought it was cheaper before. I think they used this as an opportunity to promote their pick up service. Now that people like it (remembe all those surveys we filled out?), they're going to start charging and they've upped the charge, which was probably always the plan.
I think the success was very store specific. It really never caught on at our large suburban store until COVID. There were 4 spots for pickup, I only once ever saw a car in there. The delivery pen sometimes might have one or two bins waiting for pickup at most. Now they have expanded to 12 parking spots and they are much more well used (although I have experience at most 6 cars at a time).No need to promote it as it was busy pretty much from day one.
I started using PC Express a couple of months before COVID19, late on Saturday afternoons. We live outside the city and I really liked being able to drop DH off at Church, get to No Frills, pack the car, run to the LCBO for a quick pick-up, and then pick up my online M&M order. I was able to get back to pick up DH in 45/50 minutes easy. We tend to use our local independent or Foodland to pick up the missing items. At the time I began, I had 3 free months of PC Express pick up. The $3/$5 pick up fee is worth it for me. And I will likely continue to use the service.While I have been more thank thankful for PC Express during this time, I also really miss grocery shopping. Choosing what I want. Not needing to create meals around 'grocery roulette' depending on what i get in our orders.
I will use it occasionally but not often. That being said my SIL has used a grocery pickup service for years and loves it. Each person is different.
That's $20-$25 a month if you go once a week.$5 strikes me as a small price to pay to protect your health and it is easily avoided right now by picking a different day and time. I would rather spend the $5 and sit in my air conditioned car than swelter in line waiting to get into the store on a Saturday.
I agree...anything is going to be regional. Corp looks at it on the whole and pre Covid it was very successful. My closest store started out with 4 parking spots and within 2 months of the launch they added 4 more, then a few months after that 2 more. I rarely saw any cars parked there so I asked DD....she said they needed the spots and it was going like gang busters. Similar situation with their work space....I never saw much activity in there. Again, DD said nope, they are working like crazy. Most stores have storage space behind closed doors so customers were never going to see much.....which was the plan.I think the success was very store specific. It really never caught on at our large suburban store until COVID. There were 4 spots for pickup, I only once ever saw a car in there. The delivery pen sometimes might have one or two bins waiting for pickup at most. Now they have expanded to 12 parking spots and they are much more well used (although I have experience at most 6 cars at a time).
It might be interesting to see how the locker kiosks would do at the Ottawa Rapid Transit stations. My local store is at the eastern terminus of the line.