An experience in Coles Home Delivery

Recently my wife and I decided to try home delivery for our groceries to see if it saved any time or money. Below is a summary of our experience.

Right from the start, we figured that using the Coles Home Delivery service would reduce the 'extra' spending that tends to happen when shopping in a supermarket. See a nice discount on some chocolate? 2 for 1 on baking trays? May as well pick some up even though we don't need it.

However, Coles must know this, as the minimum free delivery order was over $100. So, with this in mind, we set about buying around a week's worth of groceries.

The website itself was relatively easy to use, though suffered from serious dropout issues about midway through the shop. This, we reasoned, was due to it being a Thursday night, which is when people would buy groceries to be delivered before the weekend.

Overall, we ended up buying more than we needed anyway so we could hit the $100 mark. With a mixture of fresh meat (chicken, beef stir fry and some snags), as well as frozen meals and some vegetables, we had a nice full shopping cart.

Checkout was quite an easy process, but we must've missed our window, as all of the Friday delivery times were gone, so the dinner planned for Friday night had to be postponed. The delivery was scheduled for Saturday morning instead for ease of time.

The delivery itself went surprisingly smoothly; the driver was friendly and quick, and brought the groceries in for us. A quick signature and he was on his way, the whole process taking less than 5 minutes. Most of our food was fresh and what we had ordered. One interesting note is that if the product is out of stock, Coles will replace with it with the nearest comparable product, even if it is more expensive, at no extra charge (which happened with our potatoes and oats).

Sadly, the meat we had ordered had rather limited expiry dates. All of it would have expired in the next 3 days, not a long time if it's supposed to last close to a week.

In summary, it was a good experience, and we would definitely order again, though probably earlier in the week.