Instacart
Too loyal to your neighborhood supermarket to consider an alternative? Enter Instacart, a third-party delivery service that dispatches personal shoppers to collect and deliver items from a growing number of stores in Arlington, Falls Church and McLean. That list now includes Costco, HMart, Whole Foods Market and smaller stores such as Sur La Table, Petco and CVS. Instacart will also shop for you at grocers that have their own in-house delivery services (such as Giant and Safeway), but you’re likely to pay less if you use the store’s own app or website for deliveries.
This summer, Instacart added Wegmans Food Markets locations in Fairfax and Alexandria to the list of places its shoppers will fetch items for delivery to Arlington. The service offers one- and two-hour delivery options at certain times of day starting at $3.99, and a delivery membership for $149 a year. Personal shoppers work for a reportedly low base wage and Instacart gives you the option to tip them — or not — when you check out. That’s in addition to a 10 percent “service fee” that is automatically added but can be removed before checkout.
Some items cost more when purchased through Instacart than they would in the store. But it’s a great option for getting goods delivered from stores that don’t have their own delivery services, such as Wegmans, Harris Teeter and Costco.