Instacart: Worth it?

Not sponsored. Just my own curious musings.

For a few weeks now I've been getting coupons from Instacart for Convenience Orders. I've used a few, but this latest one I decided to skip and go to the store myself. The coupon expired a few days ago, but I was curious what the actual cost difference was had I used delivery vs. going to the store myself. 

Here are my actual grocery trip items purchased. I've written beside the items I had special discounts or coupons for. Everything else was normal store price. Please note, this is not a normal weekly grocery shopping list...we definitely eat more than bagels, orange juice, and eggs in a week. 😅

Bagels - free

Paper Plates 

Plastic Cups

Napkins

Shaving Cream x3

4 lb Sugar x3 - store had a special coupon

Half Gallon OJ x3 - store had a special coupon

Dozen Eggs 

Total: $24.89

*Same Instacart Convenience Cart with **coupons:

*There was one item I could not match exactly so I found the closest match I could which was still cheaper.

**I'm going under the assumption that I would be purchasing with a coupon. If I didn't have a coupon I would probably never use this service because it would be significantly more expensive than if I went to the store myself. This order screenshot is showing you what I would have paid if I had used Instacart to purchase. Just a reminder, my coupon expired so I could not actually apply it to the order to show you. However, I did the math myself below. 

If I add in my own math with the coupon, subtracting $20 from the total would have equalled $26.15. For this specific shopping trip, I had a coupon for free bagels, so by physically going to the store myself, I could use it and get my free bagels. I actually did not include the bagels in the Instacart order because it was going to add an extra $5 which would most definitely skew this experiment. 

Instacart ended up being only $1.26 more expensive than my in-person shopping trip. However, as I mentioned before, I would not be able to get my free bagels. 

From my experiences using it, these would be my personal pros and cons with Instacart:

Pros:

- delivered to your door

- the coupons they send you can be really great

Cons: 

- you don't get to pick your own produce

- every item is marked up, sometimes by over $1.00 from actual store prices

- can't use store coupons/flyer special prices

Keep in mind this is specifically for Convenience Orders. These are the only orders I've ever received coupons for, but they also include special pricing and extra fees. 

My personal conclusion is probably 50/50. Sometimes I would pay the extra premium to get groceries delivered to my house. Sometimes, I would rather get the savings (and/or free items) and go to the store myself. I will say, if it weren't for covid, I would have never even given a second thought to grocery delivery companies. So...I guess I'd have to thank the pandemic for introducing me to an extra level of convenience I would have never known otherwise.

🙂

Cream Cheese

One good thing that’s come out of this quarantine for a lot of people has been a chance to explore and experiment with cooking and new recipes. I’ve seen lots of people sharing photos and stories on social media about baking their own bread, making pasta from scratch, and even attempting a homemade Beef Wellington. We haven’t experimented with cooking nearly as much since we’ve had our hands full with a newborn, but we did make one thing we’ve never done before: homemade cream cheese.

Bagels and cream cheese is a favorite in our house. Unfortunately, we’re not very good at aligning the two foods together in our possession at the same time. We usually get our bagels in bulk from one store and our cream cheese from a normal grocery store. What ends up happening is we have cream cheese. We buy bagels a short while later, and then we run out of the cream cheese and have too many bagels left.

The other food “problem” in our house is milk. Only one person drinks milk in our household of four. But the amount of money to buy a half gallon is like 75% or more of what it costs to buy the whole gallon unless it’s on sale.  Usually I end up using some in recipes (biscuits, pancakes, cake, etc), but even then we’ve thrown out a good amount of milk gone bad at times.

Enter cream cheese. I googled how to make cream cheese one day and came across this recipe that used whole milk.

I won’t post the whole recipe here, but I’ll provide a shortened explanation with pictures of how it’s done.

Ingredients:

1. Whole milk
2. Vinegar or lemon juice 
3. Cheese cloth
4. Food processor ( I know this isn’t an ingredient, but without it, it’s pretty much impossible to make.)
5. Salt 

Instructions:

Bring milk to a simmer.

Add vinegar (or lemon juice) to curdle.

Strain Curds.

The bottom is whey.

Blend in food processor.

Add flavorings and store. This one is blueberry.

I bought these small mason jars when my daughter was younger and used them to store homemade baby food for her. We still use them now to make her breakfast overnight oat portions, portion canned fruit (vs buying the fruit cups), and I look forward to using them a second round for baby food!

And they make the perfect cream cheese containers :)