These groceries cost 45% more from Sobeys' Uber Eats than in-store
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Inspired by a La Presse experiment, I learned the cost of convenience. It's not just the expected fees that add to the hefty totals for groceries ordered via food delivery apps, though. Overall, ordering from Sobeys' Uber Eats storefront was 45 per cent more expensive than shopping IRL. My bill jumped from $73.16 at a Toronto brick-and-mortar Sobeys location to $105.88 via the delivery app.
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Bag, service and delivery fees, tip and taxes notwithstanding, my items cost 16 per cent more in-app, and the on-shelf sales applied only two-thirds of the time.
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La Presse journalist Marie-Eve Fournier's groceries increased 116 per cent, from $38 in-store to $82 from the same Montreal IGA on Uber Eats. Fournier admits she 'cheated a little' by selecting items from the flyer. My only guiding principle was choosing products I usually buy at Sobeys: chicken thighs, dried beans, yogurt, cheese, arugula, frozen blueberries, sparkling water, tortilla chips and toilet paper.
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Four of the nine items I bought were Sobeys' house brand, Compliments. Three were on sale in-store, two of which were reduced in-app.
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I added products to my virtual cart at the same time as my physical one, making sure there was plenty of stock so my Uber Eats shopper wouldn't have any issues fulfilling the order. It occurred to me as I completed my purchase that we were in the store at the same time. As I fumbled at the self-checkout, my shopper was already walking the aisles. They delivered my order a little over an hour after I placed it.
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Regular-priced items such as arugula, dried beans, sparkling water and tortilla chips were five per cent more expensive in the app than in the Sobeys store. Of the in-store sale items, yogurt and frozen blueberries cost 17 per cent more online, and toilet paper went up 40 per cent. Let that sink in.
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Call me naive, but I assumed the prices in an online storefront would match those on physical shelves. 'Join the club,' says Sylvain Charlebois, senior director of Dalhousie University's Agri-Food Analytics Lab, a colleague of Fournier's but not involved in her Uber Eats column. 'I used Instacart a few times during COVID, and that's it. So, I wasn't aware of these price discrepancies at all, and I suspect many Canadians aren't either.'
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According to Keerthana Rang, corporate communications lead at Uber Canada, 'Merchants are responsible for setting their own prices on their Uber Eats storefronts. Prices set by merchants in the Uber Eats app may differ from those in-store. Merchants that do offer in-store pricing on Uber Eats are highlighted with an 'in-store pricing' badge in the app, such as Metro, Food Basics, LCBO and Giant Tiger.'
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