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What Are the Best Apps for Ordering Groceries Online?

by MichellD32 Posted on March 8, 2016

If you like to cook but don’t have time to shop for food, there are plenty of mobile apps that can make it easy for you to do your shopping online.

Why bother?You’ll save time driving to the store and strolling the aisles. You may get better organized about what you cook, since you can look at recipes while you shop to figure out exactly what ingredients you need. Maybe you’ll reduce waste, too, since you won’t be tempted by impulse products while you’re standing in the check-out line.

Plus, I found when I was shopping online for groceries that often, the food I got delivered was of better quality than what I found in the store.

A big disadvantage of online grocery shopping is that food comes in a lot more bags and containersthan I would use if I shopped myself. For example, I rarely put loose apples or oranges in a plastic produce bag, but if I order them online, they come in a bag that’s not very easy to re-use. Because groceries are packaged and then boxed up so an order is easy to deliver, it’s hard to avoid all that packaging waste.

WHAT APPS TO USE?

Grocery Store – Many grocery stores have their own apps so you can shop online but keep it local. For example, the Giant chain in the Washington, D.C. area calls its online service Peapod. You get a $20 discount on your first order if it’s over $100, and the first two months delivery charges are free. They offer “natural and organic” options as well as conventional ones. A mobile app means you can order from your phone if you’re in a meeting or on the go and realize you need food but don’t have time to shop.

Boxed – Boxed is a service that lets you order packaged groceries and household products in bulk. Delivery is free on all orders over $50 and there’s no membership fee. Boxed doesn’t deliver meat, fish or fresh produce. But for cereal, cookies, toothpaste, baby food, pet supplies, coffee and tea, you order online and receive your order in 1-3 days.

Instacart – This app allows you to shop from several stores in your zip code (if they’re working with Instacart). For example, where I live outside Washington DC, I could use Instacart to shop online at Whole Foods, Costco, Harris Teeter, Safeway and Petco. The first delivery is free; thereafter, delivery fees depend on when you want your groceries delivered. Within 2 hours, the cost would be $9.99; otherwise, it looked like it would cost about $5.99 for deliveries. When I clicked on Whole Foods, a number of discounts showed up, which was appealing. Otherwise, prices online seem to be about the same as in the store.

WeGoShop – Want a sort of personal shopper to take your order, do the shopping and deliver everything to your home? Take a look at WeGoShop. It differs from other services in that the shopper goes to the stores of your choice rather than a limited selection. For example, you might want items from a liquor store, grocery store, food coop, deli and specialty store. Your WeGoShop assistant could make all those stops for you without a problem. You pay for your groceries and a service fee upon delivery by cash, check, debit, credit card or by using a WeGoShop gift certificate. You need to call to place your order.

What online grocery apps do you use? Please share.

Related
Best Grocery Shopping Apps to Help Manage Your Next Party

Disclaimer: The views expressed above are solely those of the author and may not reflect those of Care2, Inc., its employees or advertisers.

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What Are the Best Apps for Ordering Groceries Online?

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Donald Trump Trots Out Tale Of Muslims, Pig Blood, and Bullets

by LouzConstant Posted on February 20, 2016

Mother Jones

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Donald Trump ended his final campaign rally of the South Carolina primary Friday night with a story about a four-star general, Muslim insurgents, and bullets dunked in pig blood. Forty minutes into his address at a not-quite-full convention center in North Charleston, after mocking Texas Sen. Ted Cruz’s lack of enthusiasm for waterboarding, the Republican presidential frontrunner told the crowd he wanted to share an anecdote he’d heard about General John Pershing.

“General Pershing was a rough guy,” Trump said. He explained that during the early 1900s, the general was battling Muslim insurgents in the US-controlled Philippines, he decided to make a point:

He caught 50 terrorists who did tremendous damage…and he took the 50 terrorists and he took 50 men and dipped 50 bullets in pig’s blood. You heard about that? He took 50 bullets and dipped them in pig’s blood which is considered haram. And he has his men load up their rifles and he lined up the 50 people and they shot 49 of those people. And the 50th person, he said, you go back to your people and you tell them what happened. And for 25 years there wasn’t a problem.

“We’ve got to start getting tough and we’ve got to start being vigilant and we’ve got to start using our heads or we’re not gonna have a country, folks,” he concluded.

Snopes, the online mythbuster, classifies the Pershing tale—which is popular on the right—as a “legend.” “We haven’t eliminated the possibility… but so far all we’ve turned up are several different accounts with nothing that documents Pershing’s involvement,” it explains.

But a lack of evidence has never stopped Trump, especially when it comes to the anti-Islam invective that has helped keep him atop the polls in South Carolina. His proposal to ban Muslims from entering the United States is hugely popular among Republicans; a recent survey of his supporters found that just 44 percent believed Islam should even be legal. So with his candidacy on the line, he’s sticking with what got him to this point.

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Donald Trump Trots Out Tale Of Muslims, Pig Blood, and Bullets

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We Can All Breathe a Sigh of Relief: Star Wars Toymakers are Not Agents of the Patriarchy

by JuliHAVHqechv Posted on January 12, 2016

Mother Jones

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In an apparent effort to prove that you can do data journalism on literally any topic, Leah Libresco examines the merchandising bonanza of the latest Star Wars movie:

The most-recent “Star Wars” Monopoly set did what the villain of “Star Wars: The Force Awakens” couldn’t, sidelining Rey, the film’s female protagonist…. Fans signed petitions, wrote letters, and tweeted their outrage using the “#WheresRey” hashtag…. The controversy reached its climax when Hasbro, the maker of the game, said Rey will be represented in new editions.

To see whether Rey’s absence was local to Monopoly or more widespread across all “Force Awakens” toys, I did what any sensible data journalist would do: I went to a toy store. Well, a digital one. Toys R Us lists 256 toys in their online “Force Awakens” store, but only 70 of them include any of the major characters introduced in the new movie. Rey holds her own among this group.

“Rey holds her own”? I guess so. She and Finn are the main heroes of the movie, and they’re pretty close in the toy competition. The real news here is a clear anti-human bias: the biggest toy winners are Kylo and Captain Phasma, who spend most or all of the movie in masks, and BB-8, a droid so calculatingly adorable as to bring back involuntary memories of Ewoks.

Anyway, as long as we’re on the subject, you’ve probably all been waiting on the edges of your seats wondering what I thought of the movie. Well, the first week it was too crowded, so I didn’t go. I’m too old for standing in line. The next week, the kids were still out of school, and a friend was visiting who had no interest in the movie. The next week, my mother’s car broke, so I loaned her mine and had no way to get to the theater. By the time I got my car back, I had come down with a cold and didn’t feel like going. So it wasn’t until yesterday that I finally I saw it.

And I was stunned. I was prepared for anything from bad to pretty good, but it turned out to be stultifyingly boring. There’s nothing “wrong” with SWTFA. The acting is OK. The dialog is OK. The effects are OK. The pacing is OK. The direction is OK. The editing is OK. The characters are OK. As a piece of craft, it’s fine. But when you put it all together it’s two hours of nothing. And yet, the residents of Earth have spent a billion dollars on tickets! What the hell is wrong with you people?

The movie’s big mystery, of course, is “Who is Rey?” The answer is, “Who cares?” Here’s my guess: she’s a clone constructed from a preserved pubic hair of Obi-Wan Kenobi. We’ll find out in the exciting sequel!

Anyway, JJ Abrams has now ruined Lost. He’s ruined Star Trek. And he’s ruined Star Wars. He’s a one-man wrecking crew. But there’s a silver lining: at least I can now say with confidence that I’ll never waste money seeing a JJ Abrams production again.

And now for the worst part. I never thought it was possible I’d say this, but I have marginally more respect for George Lucas’s prequels now. They may have sucked, but at least he tried.

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We Can All Breathe a Sigh of Relief: Star Wars Toymakers are Not Agents of the Patriarchy

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Here’s Obama’s New Plan to Tighten Gun Laws

by LizzieStaton Posted on January 5, 2016

Mother Jones

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As expected, President Barack Obama will announce a series of gun-related executive actions Tuesday meant to expand background checks on firearm purchases and step up federal enforcement of existing gun laws.

One executive action would clarify existing law that anyone “engaged in the business of selling firearms”—including at gun shows and online—must be licensed and conduct background checks on gun purchasers. The White House’s fact sheet explains:

…it doesn’t matter where you conduct your business—from a store, at gun shows, or over the Internet: If you’re in the business of selling firearms, you must get a license and conduct background checks. Background checks have been shown to keep guns out of the wrong hands, but too many gun sales—particularly online and at gun shows—occur without basic background checks.

But as my colleague Mark Follman wrote Monday, that clarification won’t be enough: “Expanding background checks through a broader interpretation of current federal law still won’t close the so-called gun show loophole; hundreds of thousands of firearms will continue to be bought and sold with minimal regulation, both online and in person. Only an act of Congress could change that comprehensively.”

Other executive actions include:

A $500 million investment in mental-health services.
The Bureau of Alcohol, Tabacco, Firearms, and Explosives will announce a rule requiring background checks for people who purchase weapons through a trust or corporation. (The White House’s earlier efforts to close this loophole through executive action hit a roadblock nearly two years ago, when ATF officials delayed publishing the rule after facing opposition from industry groups, including the National Rifle Association.)
The White House will request funding for 200 new ATF agents and investigators to enforce existing gun laws.
The ATF will require licensed dealers who ship guns to notify law enforcement if their guns are lost or stolen.
The FBI will hire more than 230 examiners to process background checks in an overhauled system.

Obama’s announcement comes days before he hosts a town hall meeting on guns Thursday night. The move is expected to garner pushback from opponents, especially those in a divided Congress who blocked legislation three years ago to close the so-called gun show loophole. House Speaker Paul Ryan has already warned that the president’s actions was a “dangerous level of executive overreach.”

“This is not going to solve every violent crime in this country. It’s not going to prevent every mass shooting. It’s not going to keep every gun out of the hands of a criminal,” Obama told reporters on Monday. “It will potentially save lives in this country and spare families the pain of these extraordinary loss.”

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Here’s Obama’s New Plan to Tighten Gun Laws

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How to sell the gas tax to people who hate taxes and love driving

by ASDJonathan Posted on November 10, 2015

How to sell the gas tax to people who hate taxes and love driving

By on 10 Nov 2015commentsShare

Trying to get Americans to raise the gas tax is like trying to get kids to eat healthy. Deep down, both suburban car lovers and sticky little humans know that their respective standoffs are nothing more than ideological grandstanding, and that paying a bit more at the pump and knocking back those peas and carrots won’t actually be the worst thing ever. But here we are, cruising around crumbling infrastructure with our cheap gasoline. And there’s little Joey, starving to death at the kitchen table.

Here’s Grist’s own Ben Adler laying out the very real problems with this standoff — the tax one, not the peas and carrots one:

There is perhaps no more vicious, self-reinforcing cycle in American life today than our dependence on automobiles. We subsidize suburban sprawl through favorable tax treatment, we mandate it through zoning codes, and we socialize the costs of the pollution it causes. We then end up with communities segregated into shopping, offices, and homes, so spread out and car-oriented as to make walking impractical.

… With so much driving necessary to get anywhere, and far too many SUVs on the road, it’s no surprise that Americans are averse to raising taxes on gasoline.

Gas taxes are how we fund federal transportation spending. Currently, the gas tax is just 18.4 cents per gallon, the same as it was in 1993 — and one-third less once adjusted for inflation. Because we haven’t raised it for two decades, we have developed a shortfall for currently authorized spending — and that doesn’t even begin to address the considerably larger amount we should appropriate to fix our crumbling transportation infrastructure.

But a new study published in the journal Energy Policy has revealed a glimmer of hope. Through a series of online surveys conducted between 2012 and 2014, two sociologists at Michigan State University found that people were significantly more likely to support a gas tax hike if they were told that a) the money would go toward energy-efficient transportation, b) the money would go toward infrastructure repair that current taxes couldn’t cover, or c) the money would be refunded equally to all Americans, rather than given to the U.S. Treasury’s General Fund.

(Note to Joey’s parents: One thing that didn’t work was telling survey respondents how much other countries paid for gas. So, you know, maybe stop talking about how much the neighbor girl loves her broccoli.)

To design these surveys, the MSU researchers used what’s called “fear appeal literature.” This is mostly worth pointing out because the world should know that such a thing exists. But also, it’s kind of important. According to the researchers, the findings of such literature show that: “for people to take action against a threat, it is not sufficient that they believe that the threat is severe and that they are susceptible to its consequences. They also must believe that there are practical ways of protecting themselves against the threat.”

Makes sense. People want to know that their sacrifices actually matter. That’s why if I ever have kids, I plan to convince them that we’re all constantly on the verge of spontaneous combustion and that a healthy diet is the only thing keeping the flames at bay. I’ll practically have to pry those Brussels sprouts out of their terrified little hands!

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How voters would accept higher gas tax

, MSU Today.

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Could This Bill Prevent Another "Gamergate"?

by BobbyeHeinz Posted on June 4, 2015

Mother Jones

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The United States government has a pretty poor track record when it comes to tackling violent online threats: Between 2010 and 2013, federal prosecutors pursued only 10 of some 2.5 million estimated cases of cyber-stalking, according to Rep. Katherine Clark (D-Mass.). With new legislation introduced on Wednesday, Clark aims to step up the fight against trolls and protect victims of internet threats, particularly women. The Prioritizing Online Threats Enforcement Act would beef up the Department of Justice’s capacity to enforce laws against online harassment and fund more investigations of cyber-crimes.

As my colleague Tim Murphy has reported, Clark first started looking for ways to curb internet harassment after learning that her district was home to Brianna Wu, a video game developer targeted with a flood of rape and death threats from “Gamergate” trolls. Since September, Wu has reportedly received 105 death threats after tweeting her opposition to Gamergate, an online movement that led to the harassment of women involved with video gaming. “All I am asking is for law enforcement to go and get a case together and prosecute,” Wu told Wicked Local. “Because law enforcement has basically treated online threats as if they don’t matter, they have unintentionally created this climate.”

“It’s not okay to tell women to change their behavior, withhold their opinions, and stay off the internet altogether, just to avoid severe threats,” Clark told members of Congress on Wednesday. “By not taking these cases seriously, we send a clear message that when women express opinions online, they are asking for it.”

Women are significantly more likely to face internet bullying than men. In one study by researchers from the University of Maryland, fake online accounts with feminine usernames faced 27 times more sexually explicit or threatening messages in a chat room than accounts with masculine usernames did. Over the past several months, women across the country, from actress Ashley Judd to feminist commentator Anita Sarkeesian, have raised the alarm about this type of abuse.

The federal government has the authority to prosecute individuals who send violent threats over the internet thanks to the Violence Against Women Act. But just one day before Clark’s appeal to Congress, the Supreme Court on Monday may have made it more difficult for prosecutors to go after trolls. In a 7-2 decision, the justices reversed the earlier conviction of a man in Pennsylvania who had used intensely violent language against his estranged wife, including saying he wanted to see her “head on a stick,” despite the fact that she testified that his postings made her feel “extremely afraid for her life.”

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Could This Bill Prevent Another "Gamergate"?

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Editor of Leading Conservative Magazine Declares That "Some Black Lives Don’t Matter" to Activists

by SamualDRDlzfqmb Posted on May 28, 2015

Mother Jones

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Rich Lowry, editor of National Review magazine, has a plan for restoring stability to America’s currently troubled inner cities: Arrest and imprison more black people. It’s basically a long-running conservative argument, but can we get real for a minute about how he’s making it?

Here’s the profoundly cynical and callous way that he’s decided to tweak some social media language to argue in Politico that the #BlackLivesMatter movement is “a lie.” Its supporters, he suggests, are opportunistically anti-police and don’t otherwise care about inner city deaths that don’t make national news:

That high-octane trolling is accompanied by an equally cynical take on the underlying problem. Baltimore reportedly saw an uptick in murders in recent weeks, which Lowry blames on police “shrinking from doing their job” in the wake of upheaval over Freddie Gray’s death in police custody. The city’s “dangerous, overwhelmingly black neighborhoods,” he writes, “need disproportionate police attention, even if that attention is easily mischaracterized as racism. The alternative is a deadly chaos that destroys and blights the lives of poor blacks.”

Never mind that a rising awareness of policing problems in America may also have something to do with acute underlying socioeconomic ills, which, you know, destroy and blight the lives of poor blacks.

Rich Lowry. National Review Online

Lowry’s theme ignores the reality of what many Americans have found so outrageous about the cases that have drawn national media attention. Say, the fact that the white cop who instantly shot a 12-year-old black kid and then watched him bleed out on the pavement without providing any first aid still hasn’t been questioned by investigators six months after the killing. Or the fact that a black woman whose family called 911 in need of mental health assistance for her ended up dead from police use of force less than two hours later.

Perhaps Lowry should spend a little time watching these 13 videos from the past year that show mostly white cops killing mostly black men who were mostly unarmed. They are a kind of vivid, disturbing evidence that may well bring some different hashtags to mind.

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Editor of Leading Conservative Magazine Declares That "Some Black Lives Don’t Matter" to Activists

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Casino Billionaire Sheldon Adelson Is Shocked—Shocked!—by Online Gambling

by MauriciEir Posted on February 19, 2015

Mother Jones

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Casino magnate and conservative megadonor Sheldon Adelson has been on a full-scale crusade against internet gambling. An advocacy group he launched and helps to bankroll is currently at the vanguard of a lobbying effort to pass a federal ban on online wagering. The billionaire, who says he’ll spend “whatever it takes” to support the ban, claims he opposes internet gambling on “moral” grounds, because it preys on the most vulnerable members of society. What he doesn’t say is that for years his company, Las Vegas Sands Corp., tested the waters on getting into this business for itself.

Adelson’s pet cause got a boost in Congress earlier this month when Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) and Rep. Jason Chaffetz (R-Utah) introduced (for the second time) the Restoration of America’s Wire Act. The bill aims to strengthen the Federal Wire Act of 1961, which prohibited phone and wire-based wagering, by applying it to internet gambling—effectively banning the practice. The Coalition to Stop Internet Gambling, an Adelson-launched group whose chairs include former New York Gov. George Pataki (R) and former San Francisco Mayor Willie Brown (D), is lobbying heavily for the bill and running ads online and in print in support of the cause. On its website, the group casts online gambling as an out-of-control phenomenon that “crosses the line of responsible gaming by bringing gambling into our living rooms and onto our smartphones” by “targeting the young, the poor, and the elderly where they live.”

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Casino Billionaire Sheldon Adelson Is Shocked—Shocked!—by Online Gambling

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Would You Pay $20 For a Non-Reclining Seat in Front of You?

by jcxftrrly Posted on October 2, 2014

Mother Jones

Slate has a great example today of the endowment effect, aka status quo bias:

In an online survey, we asked people to imagine that they were about to take a six-hour flight from New York to Los Angeles. We told them that the airline had created a new policy that would allow people to pay those seated in front of them to not recline their seats. We asked one group of subjects to tell us the least amount of money that they would be willing to accept to not recline during the flight. And we asked another group of subjects to tell us the most amount of money that they would pay to prevent the person in front of them from not reclining.

….Recliners wanted on average $41 to refrain from reclining, while reclinees were willing to pay only $18 on average….When we flipped the default—that is, when we made the rule that people did not have an automatic right to recline, but would have to negotiate to get it—then people’s values suddenly reversed. Now, recliners were only willing to pay about $12 to recline while reclinees were unwilling to sell their knee room for less than $39.

When the status quo is a reclining seat, people demand a lot of money before they’ll give it up. But when the status quo is a lot of knee room, people demand a lot of money before they’ll give that up.

So what would happen if this experiment were done in real life on a large scale—and without any messy face-to-face negotiation? Suppose an online booking service offered non-reclining seats for a $20 discount and the seats behind them for a $20 extra charge? Would the market clear? No? Then try $15. Or $25. I’ll bet it wouldn’t take too long to find the market-clearing price, and I’ll bet it would be somewhere around $25 on most flights. (Though possibly much more on red-eyes.)

The authors of the Slate piece note that in the online experiment, the status quo would have changed only about a quarter of the time. But that’s to be expected. I’d be likely to pay for the legroom because I’m fairly tall and I sometimes want to use a laptop on my tray table. But for anyone of average height or less, it’s probably not that big a deal. Likewise, some people care about reclining and others don’t. I mostly don’t, for example. Put it all together, and I’d guess that if you offered this deal on a long-term basis, less than 20 percent of all seats would be affected.

Now, would any airline find it worthwhile to do this? Probably not. There’s no money in it for them, and enforcement would be a huge pain in the ass. But it would certainly be an interesting real-world experiment if anyone were willing to give it a go.

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Would You Pay $20 For a Non-Reclining Seat in Front of You?

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Does the Web Seem Way Slow Today? It May Be Soon If You Don’t Get in the FCC’s Face

by MazieCromer Posted on September 10, 2014

Mother Jones

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No, the internet isn’t actually broken today. Those spinning wheels of death you may have seen on Netflix, Tumblr, Reddit, Mozilla, and hundreds of other sites are part of Internet Slowdown Day, an effort to show what might happen if the internet actually did get broken by the bureaucrats at the Federal Communication Commission. The FCC will soon vote on a proposal to essentially eliminate net neutrality, the policy that forces internet providers such as Comcast and AT&T to treat all internet traffic the same. Here are five things you should know about what’s happening today:

The Participating websites aren’t actually slower: Not even Netflix is crazy enough to make a political statement by throttling itself. The spinning page-load symbols on participating sites are just widgets (see below), which anyone can download here. Some activists are also replacing their social media profile pics with images like this:

In this sense, Internet Slowdown Day is very similar to the SOPA blackout of 2012, when people and major sites across the internet blackened their logos and profile pictures to protest the Stop Online Piracy Act, which would have given the federal government wide latitude to enforce copyright law. SOPA showed that when major internet companies team up with grassroots activists, politicians tend to listen.

The real story is who is not participating: Although Google claims to support net neutrality, it’s conspicuously silent about Internet Slowdown Day. Last year, Wired‘s Ryan Singel noted that the terms of service for Google Fiber, the company’s relatively new ISP division, included some of the same provisions that Google had long decried as hostile to an open internet. By prohibiting customers from attaching “servers” to its network, Google Fiber was contradicting the principle of treating all packets of information equally, prompting Singel to accuse the search giant of a “flip-flop” on net neutrality. It’s not that simple, of course, but tech companies such as Google clearly have much less to gain from net neutrality now that they’re multibillion-dollar behemoths. Even if they don’t take on the role of actual ISPs, large tech firms can easily afford to pay cable companies for faster service, creating a competitive firewall between their services and those offered by leaner startups.

In america, every day is already an internet slowdown day: Pushing internet traffic into “slow” lanes might be more tolerable if those lanes were still really fast in absolute terms. Sadly, however, the United States ranks a pathetic 25th among nations for download speeds:

This show is bigger than the superbowl: The net neutrality debate has generated a record 1,477,301 public comments to the FCC, the commission said today. As Politico notes, that breaks the previous record of 1.4 million complaints generated by Janet Jackson’s 2004 wardrobe malfunction. The number of comments to the FCC will likely continue to grow as Internet Slowdown Day encourages visitors to voice their objections.

the fcc is not your friend: There’s no question that the FCC is facing a public backlash against its plan to gut net neutrality. The question is whether the outrage will be sufficient to change its course. FCC Chairman Tom Wheeler is a major Obama bundler and former head of two major industry groups that staunchly oppose net neutrality. He’s likely to side with the cable industry unless essentially forced to do otherwise. All of which is to say that the bar is incredibly high for Internet Slowdown Day. Until “net neutrality” becomes a household term, don’t count on Washington to care about it.

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Does the Web Seem Way Slow Today? It May Be Soon If You Don’t Get in the FCC’s Face

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