Look! Santa Brought Me Groceries! Loving that Pickup Service

I’m a do-it-yourself kind of girl. This morning, coughing and feeling like multiple blades were slicing through my head, I was out in the dark before dawn in my bathrobe loading my garbage cart and pulling it to the curb. I’m not about to whine “I’m sick and can’t do it myself.”

Why not put it out the night before? Bears. We’ve got bears who love to snack on our trash.

But COVID put a real crimp in my schedule, and I needed groceries. If I wore my mask and stayed sealed in the isolation chamber of my car, couldn’t I use their pickup service? Stores have been offering drive-through groceries since the pandemic started, but I insisted on picking out my own food, squeezing the grapefruit, grabbing whatever appealed from the sale racks, and buying those things I forgot to put on the list. Now that I was Typhoid Susie, that was not an option.

I ordered my groceries from Fred Meyer on Friday night, clicking the picture of each item as the price added up on the side. Would I accept substitutions if needed? Yes. I paid with my debit card and chose an 11 a.m. Saturday pickup time. All I had to do was go get my stuff—or ask someone else to get it for me.

The Fred Meyer app on my phone had a box to click when I was on my way. Sort of like when you tell a loved one you’re on your way home or to their house. Like someone cares, you know.

The pickup parking spaces are near the garden department at the far end of the parking lot. Ten numbered spaces. You park behind a blue sign, click “I’m here” and tell them what number you’re at. Then you wait.

How would the food come? Would there be fancy bags? Would a team arrive to heft them into my car? Would I need to come out and show them my debit card? It was a little like waiting for Santa Claus. Or a blind date. 

A young woman with a blue FM vest came pulling a flatbed cart loaded with blue bins full of brown paper bags. It must be terribly heavy, I thought. But she was all smiles as she transferred bags into one car after another until she got to me. I got out. She didn’t need my card, or me. So many bags! She said there was just one substitution, bigger grapefruit than I’d ordered, a two-cent difference.

I felt guilty just standing there while she loaded, but I didn’t want to get in her way or share any germs that might escape my N-95 mask. When I retested on Sunday, the result was negative so maybe I wasn’t contagious anymore anyway.

In a few minutes, I was loaded and on my way home, feeling elated. I got my groceries, didn’t have to beg anyone or do without, didn’t have to fight the crowds or stand in line to check out. Plus all my choices were pre-made and I could not be tempted by the goodies in the pastry section or grossed out by the dead animal smell in the meat section. 

I forgot a couple things, but I had bread and mayonnaise again. I got all the things I ordered. Well, the chicken was huge, and they gave me far more mushrooms than I expected, but boy, Santa Claus/Fred Meyer delivered. I even got light bulbs and printer paper for the office. 

This system is brilliant. It feels like having a personal shopper. Is it lazy? I don’t know. Maybe it’s more like the olden days when you took your list to the counter and the grocer got your stuff for you. 

Even if there were no COVID, think about people who are sick, who can’t walk, who have bad backs, who suffer from social anxiety, or parents wrangling a herd of kids. It could even help middle-aged people taking their elderly parents shopping. My father was horrible to shop with, blocking the aisles while we debated every little thing. Imagine if we could have picked everything out at home and then arrived to have it placed in the trunk, wow.

I feel empowered. Look at me taking care of myself. And God bless the blue-vested elves grabbing my goodies off the shelves.

Fred Meyer is not the only local store offering this service. Walmart and Safeway do it, too. Ray’s in Waldport has curbside pickup. I hope they keep it up when COVID is just a distant memory. It’s a big help for many people and kind of fun, too.

What about you? Have you done drive-through/curbside pickup shopping for groceries or other things? Did it work out all right?

Author: Sue Fagalde Lick

writer/musician California native, Oregon resident Author of Freelancing for Newspapers, Shoes Full of Sand, Azorean Dreams, Stories Grandma Never Told, Childless by Marriage, and Up Beaver Creek. Most recently, I have published two poetry chapbooks, Gravel Road Ahead and The Widow at the Piano: Confessions of a Distracted Catholic. I have published hundreds of articles, plus essays, fiction and poetry. I'm also pretty good at singing and playing guitar and piano. View all posts by Sue Fagalde Lick