Students are well known for being lazy. Not getting up till the afternoon, only eating food that can be cooked in under two minutes in a microwave and doing anything possible to avoid work. Now I like to think that I’m not to bad as students go – sure I do the sleeping thing well but the rest I’m happy to do. Especially cooking. The problem with cooking though is that you need things to cook with and someone has to go and get them. And more importantly, bring them back. Well, in my student house we’ve just finished 40 exams in just under three weeks (That’s between 5 of us – my share was 10) and no one has energy for pretty much anything useful.

After a rather lengthy let’s decide what we’re eating session we ended up with a rather nice menu for the week (Including our farewell five course meal on the weekend!) but no one would go and get it. Students eh? Anyway, it became apparent that if we wanted something other than chips in the week we’d have to try one of the home delivery services.

First port of call was Sainsburies’s web site as that was were we normally go shopping but snail mail was required to sign up for their (Free) home delivery service, we needed food quickly so that was crossed off. Safeways website had no mention of a home delivery service, so we headed off to Tesco’s website.

Tesco offered an instant sign up so straight away I banged my details in no problems, and then began shopping. Shopping is easy enough to do. Once the shopping system has loaded (Takes a while the first time) you are presented with a list of special offers (We gravitated towards the cheap beer naturally) in the main section and a list of departments available for you to browse through. Beer duly added to basket, we noticed a little feature in the bottom left of the screen that tells you the last item added to your virtual basket. Didn’t find it to useful personally but I suppose
if you’re memory isn’t great it may be useful.

Anyway, after a while browsing we got stuck when trying to locate coconut milk for the Thai Curry. Time to hit the search function. Coconut milk was found at the first attempt and from then on we used the search facility virtually constantly. However, the search facility has one draw back. You can only search for specific products, our search for Washing Up Liquid turned up no results. A search for Fairy Liquid would have turned results though.

A nice feature that site has is an information panel on most products, with some text and a picture. Although it never seems to be there when you really want it. Another good feature is the ability to give specific instructions on individual items to the person responsible for actually doing your shopping. We haven’t used it so can’t comment on how useful it actually is but on the face of things it appears good.

Sometimes though when you go shopping you can’t find exactly what you want. How do you deal with that online? You have to choices – find a suitable replacement or don’t buy anything. We chose replacement and things worked out quite well, the only problem was Tesco’s seemed to have no Pork at all. Causing problems because guess what the main course of the big dinner is!

Delivery was very prompt, you get to choose two hour slots for your delivery to come in and ours duly came right at the start of the 1-3pm slot. Naturally sods law came into play and I was having a shower when it arrived. I heard my housemate excelle’s little voice come through the bathroom door telling me my signature was needed. I thought that was a little odd because my understanding was anyone over 18 could sign for the shopping. By the time I’d got the soap off and was vaguely dry though someone in the house with sufficient mental capacity had figured that out and signed so I finished my shower and came out
in peace to check over the shopping Everything seemed fine, you get a receipt as well as a sheet of paper detailing any changes that were made to your order due to availability.

Overall it’s been a pretty satisfactory experience, although I think next term we will switch to Sainsburies. A – because delivery is free, it costs £5 from Tescos and B Tescos’s own brand crisps and squash aren’t overly nice and besides, I live of Sainsburies tropical squash :)







PS – What does Tesco stand for?








Quality food at low prices! Dear me, I’ll stick to music ops in the future I think!

NOTE - The above statement was a joke.