[continued from previous reply]

(4B.) The next day was uneventful. You were silently thankful that the delivery guy didn't call you while you were at work and pointlessly try to browbeat you into agreeing to an afternoon delivery. When you got home at 6PM, after changing out of your work clothes and freshening up, you began the prep work for your chili. You set your phone on the kitchen counter next to you while you de-seeded and de-ribbed the bell peppers, chopped them and the onions, and minced the garlic. When that was done, since you were already in the kitchen, you wiped down the counters and range and tidied things up. At 7:30, you phoned the supermarket and asked them where your stuff was. The manager apologized and promised to phone you back. At 7:50, he called and apologized some more. There was a mixup and your order never made it onto the delivery truck. But he assures you that they'll deliver everything tomorrow.

You'd already chopped the vegetables. And, luckily, you had eggs and cheese. You made a frittata. The next day, you went back to the supermarket and bought more onions and bell peppers. You bought more beef too, since the pack you'd bought two days earlier had passed its use-by date.

(5.) Why would you visit a grocery store? Jeez what year is it. Of course, you shopped online, at the supermarket website, paid by credit card, and everything was delivered hassle-free three days later from the supermarket chain's warehouse, located some miles away. Well, it was almost hassle-free. The delivery person did haggle over the time -- they wanted to deliver everything at 2PM and it took you a while to make them understand that there would be nobody at home until 6PM. And then, though, he had agreed to deliver between 6PM and 7PM, he didn't actually show up until 8PM.

After tipping the delivery person and cutting open the taped-shut cardboard boxes containing your purchases, you were a bit aggravated to find that they had charged you for two cartons of Brand X organic, free range eggs ... but delivered two cartons of (cheaper) Brand Y eggs. Also, some of the vegetables had seen better days. No matter. The former was an honest mistake and the latter was a small price to pay for convenience you knew that you could cut out the iffy bits of the vegetables before using them. You put the eggs in the fridge, after calling the supermarket and being shuffled from one employee to another to get them to agree that you could exchange the wrong eggs for the ones that you had paid for at your local branch the next evening, provided that you could show them the printout of your order confirmation email. Then, you briskly began the task of cutting up the now-empty cardboard boxes and folding and stacking the pieces so that you could get them into a bag or so that you could get rubber bands around them ... for the trip downstairs to the cardboard recycling bin. It was nearly nine by the time that you got back into your apartment and slipped off your sneakers to sweep up the slivers of cardboard and little bits of flotsam and jetsam (dried bits of banana-something from the banana boxes and wispy little feathers that had been inside the boxes that had held cartons of eggs before being reused by the supermarket) that ended up on your kitchen floor while you were unloading and then cutting up and packing the cardboard.

Except for permutation #1 (I haven't seen supermarkets using paper bags here, possibly because of the condensation issue), we have experienced each of these scenarios, numerous times.

I didn't even touch on what it's like to be walking home from the supermarket, in the open, and getting caught in a sudden downpour. Even if you are carrying a tiny collapsible umbrella, it's a neat trick to use it if you're carrying more than a tiny amount of stuff since holding an umbrella with one hand entails carrying everything else with the remaining hand. Fun times.

I didn't take up the question of multiple stops/errands, either. Without a vehicle to hold stuff in between stops and to get you from one stop to another faster, everything takes much, much longer to accomplish and the planning outings becomes much more than a matter of leaving the supermarket stop for last so that your ice cream won't melt. You've got to juggle your guesstimates as to the weights of the stuff you'll be picking up or dropping off at each stop, the form factors of the packages they'll be in, and (for those establishments where you'll be making purchases and which offer delivery) their delivery times and your past experiences with the reliability of their delivery personnel.