June 2, 2015

Safeway Delivery Versus Whole Foods Instacart

There are only a couple of options for grocery delivery now where we live.   Safeway delivers to homes and you can also get Instacart delivery.   Mostly for curiosity sake I thought it would be interesting to compare the prices for a sample shopping cart of items.

I'm comparing a small sample of organic items from Safeway home delivery and Instacart delivery from Whole foods :


Safeway Whole
juice 2.99 4.99
eggs 3.79 3.99
milk 7.19 5.49
banana 2.52 2.8
chicken 6.59 4.99

23.08 22.26

The total price for the groceries I chose isn't too far apart.   But there are pretty decent price differences on most items in my example.   The juice, milk and chicken are each $1-2 different.   So depending on what you bought you could easily see either option being cheaper.

If these prices seem high then thats because they are organic and home delivered.  

The normal delivery fee for Instacart is $7.99 for orders under $35 and $3.99 for orders over $35.   You'd be best then to order over $35 if at all possible to minimize that fee.    Instacart has a 1 hour delivery window.

Safeway charges $9.95 for orders over $150 and $12.95 for orders under $150 and they might also tack on a fuel surcharge.    But if you pick a wider delivery window time you can get $3 or $6 off the charge so that could bring it down to as low as $6.95 for this order.

With the normal delivery fees included you'd come out over $5 cheaper for my example if you used Instacart.   With a broader delivery window you can get it cheaper with Safeway.


Bottom Line :  Depending on what exactly you order and what kind of delivery window you need you could get a cheaper price with either option.
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