by Kenna S Eaton, GM

Today I took a turn at shopping for members using Coop2go, the name we have given to our curbside shopping service for our members who either chose not to, or cannot, shop for themselves. It was fun—and challenging, and, if you have ever attempted to shop for someone else then you know how darn hard it can be to fulfill that shopping list.

Turns out that we all make many, many decisions when shopping from choosing the avocado that is right for you today to deciding which pasta sauce to get when your favorite is out of stock. The number of choices we make when shopping is amazing! And when the co-op staff shop for you even more work than finding the right item is involved from downloading and printing out your order to picking the items , to running them through the register, bagging them up in separate boxes before storing them in the freezer, the cooler or the backroom (depending on what is in the order) , to calling for payment, coordinating the pickup , and finally running it out to the car and loading it before thanking you—well, whew, I’m tired just writing about it!

I have received a few questions lately about the new 10% surcharge we started adding this past week and even questioning the term we use of ‘surcharge’. However, if you think about all that work you can perhaps understand why we made this change. This fee does not by any means cover all of our time or costs—but does go part way to helping us soften the financial impact to our business. Frankly we felt 10%, rather than a fixed price of say $5 or $10 was more equitable—the bigger the order, the longer it takes and the more it costs, and vice versa.

We have also received some feedback from our regulars—another reason we love our members--mostly understanding that we need to do this, but also wondering if we could rename this charge to reflect what is really is—an appreciation of the work and all it entails of what is, in essence, a personal shopping service. So, we’ll play around with some names and see where we land…hopefully whichever term we chose will express the challenges (and love) we put into shopping for you!