Stacy Smith works as a personal shopper for Shipt - an online grocery service that launched in Alabama three years ago.
“One of the tricks of the trade is that the freshest bread is always at the bottom [laughs].”
It works like this. You order your groceries through the app. Smith drives her car to the store, gets your items, and drops them off at your house. Then the process repeats with the next customer.
Most people in the U.S. drive to the grocery store once or twice a week - even more if they forget something on their list. That can be a hassle for people like Jennifer Purucker (per-ROO-curr). She started using Shipt not too long after it came to Kalamazoo in August.
“Being a full-time student, employee, all the different thing going on in my life. It was, at the time, a wise choice to save myself time.”
Anne Goodchild teaches environmental engineering at the University of Washington. She also researches transportation logistics. She says other than driving to work, going to the grocery store is the most common type of trip we do as Americans - and it’s not very green.
“We don’t carpool right, we don’t pick up friends typically to go to the store. So it’s an individual trip.”
And Goodchild says that takes a lot of gas for a simple trip to the grocery store. Surprisingly, sitting at home and letting the groceries come to you could be the best for the planet - at least when it comes to greenhouse gas emissions from cars. Goodchild found that grocery delivery services can cut emissions by 20 to 75 percent compared to individual trips. Why? Because though big delivery trucks use more gas, they can also pick up multiple orders at once.
“So it’s sort of like a bus in that way, right. A bus is a bigger vehicle than your personal car, but if we put enough people on the bus we all recognize that that’s an advantage in terms of vehicles on the road and carbon dioxide produced from that travel.”
And if you give the delivery service a longer time frame to drop off your order, that curbs emissions by up to 90 percent. Goodchild says these companies - like AmazonFresh and Peapod - want to save money. So it’s in their best interest to be able to drop off orders in the same neighborhood
But here’s the thing - not every online grocery delivery service works this way. There are a growing number of companies that use the personal shopper model - like Shipt, Instacart, and Walmart. Goodchild says using personal shoppers isn’t any greener than you going to the store yourself.
“In fact it can actually be worse than that if the driver isn’t originating from where the product is - cause then you add another leg to that trip.”
Julie Coop is the spokesperson for Shipt. She says Shipt employees don’t tend to do multiple orders at once. Though Shipt doesn’t allow its drivers to use cars older than 2000 models and probably saves more on packaging.
“So if a member asks for paper bags that’s what the shopper will get. From time to time we do have members that request reusable bags, so if they’re sustainable in their own lives we’re going to honor that.”
Being environmentally-friendly often flies in the face of convenience. But Goodchild says it doesn’t have to be that way.
“I feel like sometimes there’s this sort of passive sense of like, ’Oh what’s happening to us.’ And I think there are really…there are ways in which this technology allows us to do better.”