Attention Hobokenites! Online grocery shopping through FreshDirect (www.freshdirect.com) is now available (effective August 18^th) in select areas of Hoboken. What does this mean? Let someone else hoof it up the stairs with bags of cereal and various sundries? Less fatigued ghost-walking through the supermarket a couple of times a week after a hard day at work? More free time?

Yes, yes and yes.

This is essentially a virtual grocery store and not a brick & mortar establishment. A plethora of goods await the shopper with every category you can imagine (fruits, vegetables, meats & seafood, deli, dairy, frozen, health & beauty, and wine just to name a few). Bulk and catering items can be ordered for parties and other social gatherings necessitating a lot of food.

According to the FreshDirect site, wine actually cannot be delivered outside of New York state (so that is not an option for us in the Mile Square).

For grocery orders of less than $100 total, the delivery charge is $6.95. Over $100, the charge drops to $4.95. The minimum amount per order is $40.

They use some high quality food experts to guarantee freshness and the product you receive. Costs are reduced due to the reduction of middle-man distributors (thus the food is four to seven days fresher than the standard supermarket).

Choose the items you want, and then put them in your shopping cart. Quite simple for a busy/lazy person to follow…and the food is often delivered the next day (if ordered before 9:00pm).

Once you fill up your cart the items chosen can be saved for the next time. This is an important part of online grocery shopping and the follow-up shopping. All you have to do is shop once, and then the true convenience of the service appears. With a saved grocery list, you can choose the items you normally buy, then add the additional needed items. All in all, once you get the hang of this type of shopping experience, the task of grocery shopping can take five minutes.

There are advantages to the consumer in going the virtual route for normal staple goods. For starters, you do not have to go up and down crowded aisles to buy groceries. Online grocery shopping allows others to do it for you. Outsourced can be the weekly foraging for food (luckily this outsourcing stays in the US).

Another advantage for the consumer is more free time. Often people spend 1-2 hours per week examining broccoli, thumping melons, or utilizing every square inch of the grocery cart through efficient box stacking. When shopping can be performed during lunchtime at the workplace in the space of a few minutes, the use of all this extra time is up to you.

For those out there with children, avoiding the grocery store can be a blessing. Just point and click, and your goods are brought right to your home (without the hassle of dragging kids around in the store).

Another advantage to be gained is having all of the shopping done at one location. Health and Beauty items, which might be bought at a pharmacy, can be delivered through the online service. No need to hit a few different stores to stock up on the necessities.

But there are disadvantages for online grocery shopping. Many of them are perceptual in nature and just come from a lack of knowledge…and trust from consumers. These issues have been difficult for the online grocery industry to truly grow as the Internet has.

One such disadvantage to the consumer is the lack of true decision power. Picking up Cheerios yourself or having someone else perform the task will, at the end of the day, still yield Cheerios. The uniformity of standard grocery items like this is enough to trust someone else with the choice. Cheerios in Texas taste like Cheerios in Alaska.

But, it is a different story when it comes to items with variability. Sandwich meat, lettuce, onions, and steak are perfect examples of variable items that are often chosen at the point of purchase. It often boils down to a reliance on people they do not know choosing their food for them.

One way that FreshDirect assists in overcoming this is by having food experts do the quality control and the picking of the food. In essence, they have employees that are more knowledgeable of the product than the consumer.

When it comes right down to it, do you know what a good bell pepper should look like? Or perhaps shrimp or tarragon? Most assume they do, because they only drive by feel.

This is a major obstacle that deserves a leap of faith from consumers. Think of it this way…would an online grocer (like FreshDirect) expect you to shop with them again and again if they provided poor product? No they would not.

Online grocery shopping facilitates a major chore in life by its convenience and simplicity. FreshDirect is a great example of such a facilitator.

And it is now available in Hoboken.

Good luck and happy clicking!