Deliver unto me

When Em's in a good mood, I don't mind taking her grocery shopping. She wins over other patrons with her giggles, and we'll sing the ABCs while cruising the aisles. As the Terrible 2s approach and her vocabulary increases, so do the grocery store meltdowns. If she's in a *mood* and sees me place yogurt or strawberries or string cheese in the cart, she'll lunge for the item and yell, "OPEN! YOGURT! OOOPPPEN!"

Plus, we live on the second story of our condo complex, which limits the amount of groceries I can juggle while making sure Em gets up the 15 stairs safely.

With this in mind, you can imagine how quickly I jumped at the opportunity to review Vons Home Grocery Delivery service.

Here's what rocked about it:

• I shopped from my couch.
• I saved a step and didn't have to write a list. I read directly from recipes I planned to make and just searched for the necessary ingredients.
• The prices weren't bad!
• Von's Club card prices are automatically applied.
• I was able to choose a two-hour delivery window for the next day. Two hours is not bad at all, particularly compared to the 8-hour windows you typically have to commit to for the cable or utility guys.
  
• I chose the 7-9 window, and the delivery arrived promptly at 7!
• I didn't have to carry the items up our stairs myself.
  
• The cold items arrived cold.
  
• The delivery guy walked me through the bill.
• As he started to leave, I stopped him to give a tip. He very politely declined and said it was against company policy. I'm not hooray-ing that I'm not able to reward someone for quality service, but it is nice not to have to pay extra. I'm hopeful that Vons compensates its drivers nicely.
• I cheered aloud when I saw this product on the site:

This stuff is HARD TO FIND! Much to the chagrin of my hardcore baking friends, I look for this
Red Velvet cake mix each time I'm in the baking aisle.

The few minor cons about the experience:

• There were a few items I didn't receive, but that's not unlike when I visit actual stores myself. Not everything is always available everywhere, which is fine. The driver did note which items weren't available. (You can choose to have alternate similar products delivered if the chosen items is out of stock, but I didn't.)
  
• I'm a visual person, so it wasn't as easy to visualize how much I actually needed of a particular ingredient on the website, even with the amounts listed.
• Some options were for product categories seemed more limited online than in-store, but I could be wrong about that.
  

Even with those few "cons" above, I enjoyed the Vons Home Grocery Delivery service and would recommend it to my readers. As a bonus, I get to offer you a promo code good for free delivery and $7 off your first order. Simply enter "sayit" in the promo code box when you check out.

Enjoy!

Disclosure: I received Vons gift cards to try out the service, but the views expressed are all mine.