When is the best day and time to grocery shop?
I have been limiting my trips to the grocery store to about once every three weeks. I try to go when the store is not crowded, early in the morning. But often the shelves are bare, particularly for TP, paper towels, cleaning supplies, meat and beans/legumes. Are there better days and times to go for maximum inventory and minimum human interaction?
Answers ( 2 )
My experience shopping is similar to yours, was going early to avoid exposure to a lot of people - and that was the setup for senior shopping hours, but which didn’t help much. Besides household items, meats weren’t restocked either, so had to readjust. I tried morning hours first on Sunday, thought they would still be stocked for the weekend and sometimes that worked. Now I’ve alternated to Friday around 10 am to noonish. That seems to be my local store sweet spot, and into early afternoon. They are stocking for the weekend, and the bigger crowd won’t be in till later Friday afternoon and Saturday morning.
Usually grocery store ads come out on Thursday, expecting shopping for the weekend, which means they start stocking Thursday and Friday. And while I never really shopped by the ads, there’s no not noticing that is a schedule they all follow, so beating the crowd early for a weekend might be the way to go. I’ve been going weekly for the past three months and it’s worked for me so I’d suggest a try.
Thank you, Kathleen, for this great answer! As it happened, we went today (Friday) at around 9:30, and it looks like that is our store's "sweet spot" too! Fewer people than when I was getting there at 8:00 and better selection than earlier in the week. Still no cleaning products, but maybe that is just life for the foreseeable future.