How to Choose a Supermarket (and Automate Your Grocery Shopping)
Episode #6 of the course How to outsource your diet by Liam Smith
Hello and welcome to Lesson 6. You’re now over halfway to diet domination!
A question for you: How long do you usually spend grocery shopping each week? What if you add the time it takes to travel to the store and back, as well as waiting in line? It adds up, doesn’t it?
Research says a typical American spends well over an hour grocery shopping each week—that’s nearly seven working days per year! Not to mention the stress of it all!
In today’s lesson, you’re going to learn how to automate your grocery shopping by doing it online and with help from a virtual assistant. But first …
Why Online Shopping?
Almost one in three Brits now do most their grocery shopping online. And this trend is increasing year after year, in Britain and overseas. Why?
It’s more convenient. You can shop when you want with no waiting in line or travel time. Plus, an increasing range of delivery and collection options means it now suits most people’s lifestyles. It’s also easier to track your spending, and apparently, you’re more likely to pick up a bargain too.
But the most significant reason for choosing online is that you can ask a virtual assistant to do your shopping for you, regardless of where they are based in the world. All you need to do is provide your requirements and review your shopping basket, about 15 minutes of work. Everything else is then taken care of. So, you get all the benefits with no queues and no stress.
Setting Up Your Online Shopping
The first thing you’ll need to do is to check what options are available in your local area. A search in your favorite search engine should do the trick.
For the purpose of this lesson, let’s use the UK as an example. Supermarkets who offer online food shopping include:
• Tesco
• ASDA
• Ocado
• Waitrose
• Iceland
How do you choose?
The easiest way is to select the supermarket that you already know and like, or ask a friend for their recommendation.
But what if you don’t have a particular preference? If quality is important to you, pop down to your local store to get a feel for their produce. If price is important to you, it pays to consult a price comparison site, such as mySupermarket in the UK, to compare the cost of a typical basket across supermarkets.
Finally, make sure to check that they deliver to your home or allow you to collect from store. This information will be available through their website.
Once you’ve selected a supermarket, simply follow the steps on their website to sign up for an account.
The next step is to save your delivery address to your online supermarket account. The most popular slots for delivery or collection go like hotcakes. The solution is for your virtual assistant to reserve one for you in advance.
So, now you have an online supermarket account that’s ready for your assistant to use, meaning your grocery shopping can now be automated!
In tomorrow’s lesson, we start to pull everything together. You’ll learn how to create a fool-proof request to your assistant, with a template to make it super easy.
Speak soon,
Liam
P.S. You may ask, what if there are no supermarkets that do online shopping in my area?
If that’s that case, then you can skip this step. All you need to do is to amend your request to ask your assistant to do your meal planning, which we’ll cover in a later lesson, and have them create shopping lists only. You can then use this list to go shopping yourself.
Recommended reading
Grocery Shopping: Online vs. In Store
Recommended book
The Blue Zones Solution: Eating and Living Like the World’s Healthiest People by Dan Buettner
Share with friends