My husband and I did our first ever grocery pickup from an online order today at an Aldi store in Belleville, MI. Overall, the process was very smooth – only my lack of having a smart phone proved to be just a minor snag (though I did use my dumb phone to reply to the text letting them know I was there). I was supposed to use a smart device to let them know when I’d arrived to pick up our stuff, and my tablet is Wi-Fi only – and I couldn’t get a signal where we were parked (they had designated curbside pickup spots). No worries, I put on a mask, went inside, and tried to find an employee who wasn’t operating a register. I found someone behind some open stock room doors, let them know I had an order to pick up, and gave my name and our parking spot number.

Strangely, calling them on the phone to let them know you’d arrived wasn’t even an option. The only phone number I was able to find by looking online didn’t look like it was anything other than a corporate phone number. If you look up “store details” on the store’s web site, it doesn’t list a phone number.

Oh well, there is more than one way to slay a dragon, right? Perhaps one day I will be dragged into this millennia and actually get a smart phone, though I don’t want one (I know that’s really, really weird, it’s just my little hangup about having a palm sized computer left in a pants pocket accidentally and going on a wild ride in the washing machine, and with me, it’s truly a legit hangup). Ahem…

A store associate put all of our stuff in the trunk, which was one more thing we didn’t have to do, right? Wrong! Turns out they used paper grocery sacks, and just kind of shoved them in to make them fit, which means I had some things spilled out of them when I got home. No worries, I just got my reuseable bags from inside and repacked everything. I didn’t want to try carrying in bags with no handles (I’ve seen too many movies where this ends up in disaster).

Aside from those two minor annoyances, I was pretty satisfied with the experience -and would definitely do it again!