Hello Amazon

/ hsoi

Saying goodbye to Sprouts is tough. You know the saying, “don’t you what you’ve got, ’til it’s gone”? Well, now that Sprouts is gone, I realize it was a larger part of our groceries than I realized (I knew it was a primary, but it’s even more than I knew). I didn’t realize how many Sprouts-branded things Wife bought. Everywhere I look in the fridge, in the pantry, I see Sprouts, Sprouts, Sprouts.

But in time, our stock will dwindle. And in the meantime, I can hope Sprouts will reconsider their decision, basing upon facts and not emotion.

The hardest part was thinking what to do as an alternative. There’s a lot of things we bought that we can’t find at other stores in town, or to do so would become difficult, with Wife running all over town to collect all the things we use. That’s a big sink of gas money, and most of all… time.

You know the saying about closing a door and opening a window? Well… I think in this case, what was opened was a laptop computer lid. 🙂

I’ve shopped at Amazon for many years. I mean, what CAN’T you find there? Very few things. And Amazon works at expanding its offerings all the time.

I’ve never bought Amazon Prime tho, because I never felt like I ordered enough in a year to have Prime offset the shipping costs. I mean, most things I order from Amazon I can wait a week or two for, so I’ll always pick the cheapest slowest option, which often yielded free shipping anyways. So it was just difficult to justify Prime. And things like Kindle and movies? Meh.

But I thought about it. Yeah, what can’t you get? Often the prices are competitive or better. So Wife and I sat and searched Amazon for many of the foodstuffs and other products we bought at Sprouts. And gee if we couldn’t find most everything there. In fact, there’s probably a lot of non-Sprouts things too that we could get. I tried to convince Wife to consider Amazon for things like toilet paper, paper towels, etc. (things you know you’ll use and use a lot of, eventually in time), but the idea never really took off with either of us because again, shipping.

But now? Well, we’ve been pushed to try it. 🙂

I signed up for Amazon Prime. When it comes to things like groceries yeah, I’d rather have it in 2 days than 2 weeks. If I can get 2-day shipping “for free”, and we can buy a huge bulk of stuff via Amazon (regardless of container size and weight), well gee… I suspect we could do alright with this. That local grocery shopping could be reduced to things like fruit, eggs, milk, etc.. I mean, we get our veggies delivered once a week….

The biggest win that Wife sees? Time. It’s a big time sink to do all that grocery shopping. But now? She can shop and build her cart in her own time. While she’s homeschooling the kids, they’re doing some work and she can search and click to get shopping done. Kids need attention? she can stop, tend to them, then resume shopping as time permits. She can shop at 5 AM before the kids get up, or whatever. There’s more flexibility, there’s better use of time.

I also think it could be a win because impulse buying might be curbed.

So… this will be an experiment. We haven’t bought anything yet and I don’t know how it will go. But, this should be fun to explore.

11 thoughts on “Hello Amazon”

  1. We went Prime back in Oct. Love it. We don’t order TONS from them, and like you, most of the time the slower shipping option wasn’t an issue, and if I wanted it faster I had no problem paying for faster shipping…..but we started looking at some of the video stuff that was availible free to Prime members, and realized there was a TON of stuff there we’d watch, and watch ALOT. So we bought it. Glad we did, they upped the minimum purchase for free shipping not to long afterwards.

    • Haven’t explored the video stuff yet, but we did do away with cable and broadcast tv (just our AppleTV and DVD/Blu-Ray collection) and I figure exploring the Prime video stuff will eventually happen.

      Meantime, the Prime shipping has been great. It’s done the job… making us turn to Amazon for more things (customer retention). I still ordered a lot of things from them anyways, but Prime just makes it easier.

      We’ve done one grocery shop with them so far. Wasn’t a total shop (still have to go in town for some things), but so far so good.

  2. I have grown to love Prime. We use it quite often for around-the-house stuff, but I also use it for Hatcher Knives stuff. Bandsaw blades, rubber gloves, WD40, various tools, Amazon has an amazing array of stuff.

  4. Big fan of Prime (both for the online stuff and for the free shipping), but . . . for many things, it’s difficult to beat Costco, especially if you live in a state without sale tax for food items.

    I keep an eye on stuff I’m interested in, and even Costco’s regular prices beat Amazon, and it’s not even close when They are running coupons on particular items.

    For instance, we buy Pure Protein Bars (about $1/bar on amazon) are $0.69/bar when on sale at Costco.

    Costco also treats their employees very well (one of the highest employee satisfaction and loyalty out there), and no weapons policy that I know of. Plus . . . big savings on gas, especially considering the free AnEx credit card will pay a 3% rebate on gas purchases.

    Lastly . . . samples . . . one can basically get free meals just walking around, even discounting their very reasonable food court prices.

    No, I have no financial interest in the company, but I am happy to share my opinion on what I think are good companies.

    • We used to shop at Costco a lot. Love(d) the place. So much good stuff, precisely what we want. I mean, we love(d) it. And I am to understand they are a fairly good employer.

      But we no longer shop at Costco on principle.

      They do have a weapons policy — and they are anti-gun. Which seems odd a times, when they sell things like gun safes. But hit the Googles and you’ll see that Costco does have an official “no guns allowed” policy. While this is the case, I’ve seen variances regarding enforcing this prohibition. For example, here in Texas to prohibit CHL holders you have to post a specific “30.06 sign”, but I’ve never seen such a sign (at least, I didn’t when we were patrons of Costco). However in other states that might have no uniform signage, just need a “no guns” posting, I’ve read reports they do that. So… I don’t know. But it does seem pretty clear that Costco is anti-gun. So even if they aren’t directly enforcing it in Texas (like Sprouts has chosen to do), it’s still company policy so that’s good enough to tell you their intent.

      We’ve got some other beefs with Costco too, but in the end, they’re just not a company we’ll give our money to. Pity tho, because all they are doing is treating good people as criminals.

    • Loved amazon before, and now prime? Geez… it’s already starting to spoil us. It makes it a lot easier to make buying decisions because there isn’t that weighing of the additional cost of shipping and wait time and so on.

  6. Pingback: How’s it going, Amazon? | Stuff From Hsoi

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