Peapod Review and $75 GIANT Gift Card GIVEAWAY

The milk man is back, and he brought all of the other groceries with him in his fancy new green truck. 

Peapod is a grocery delivery service offered by GIANT, one of our local grocery chains, and it’s just about as amazing as it sounds. They asked me if I would be willing to review it for them and then give away a $75 gift card so that one of you could try it out, on the house. Um…let me think about that real hard…do I want to let Peapod deliver groceries for my family and yours to both of our houses this week? YES! Of course I do! 

So I tried it out so that I could give you an honest review and our first order was just delivered yesterday morning. 

What I like: 

• I like seeing my list and my total on the screen as I add everything to my online shopping cart. It makes it very easy to stay on budget. 
• I like that GIANT has the best selection of any of our local stores as far as organic options as well as just produce in general. 
• I like that they accept coupons.
• I like that the meat and produce I got in my order was fresh. I was a little hesitant about letting someone else pick out my meat. But the beef and chicken both had sell by dates that were still several days away and were pretty much exactly what I would have picked out myself. 
• I like that I did not have to take my kids to the store with me. Any mom who has ever had to wear an infant while she pushed a preschooler and a toddler through the grocery store in an oversized shopping cart with a car attached to the end knows what I’m talking about. 
• I like that this would be a wonderful service for the elderly or anyone with a disability that limits mobility. When my grandmother was in her eighties and stopped driving, I used to take her to the grocery store every week. A service like this would have made her more independent and less reliant on my schedule. 
• I like that I got to select a two hour window the following morning. I was expecting to have to wait a few days, but my groceries were at my door in less than 24 hours from the time I placed my order! I knew they were coming yesterday morning between 9 and 11. They actually came about 10 minutes late, which was completely fine, they called ahead of time and told me the driver was running a few minutes behind schedule. There were other less optimal time frames to choose from that even let you save some money on the delivery fee. 
• I really liked that there was a place on the online form to tip the driver. We used to have milk delivered from a local farm and it was always SUPER awkward about whether or not we were supposed to tip him. I always tried, but he never wanted to take it and it got very weird. With Peapod I got to put the driver’s tip on the oder up front and it was already there. Plus I didn’t have to have any cash on hand, which is also an issue for me sometimes with tipping because I don’t usually carry cash at all. 

Can we talk about their Peapod Kids Give Back Program for just a minute? They didn’t even tell me about this, I just found it with my mad Google skills, but I’m going to talk about it anyway. Because the math teacher in me is more than a little in love with this! Peapod gives gift cards to classrooms so that the kids can do math lessons, and then use their delivery system to shop online for groceries to donate to local food banks. They challenge the students to buy the most nutritious food for the least amount of money. Um…THAT IS AWESOME!

Also, GIANT is one of my favorite sponsors to work with on the blog. When a local family suffered a devastating house fire and I reached out to all of the corporate sponsors I had at the time, trying to get some help for them, GIANT was the only company that responded and offered to help and sent gift cards so that the family could buy food to replace what was lost. 

So, as you can see, there are a lot of things I really like. 

I had a reader ask if I think it is worth the deliver fee. I’m going to say yes, I really do, because when I go into the store (especially if my kids are with me) I usually throw at least $5-10 worth of impulse items into my cart anyway. With Peapod I didn’t do that at all. It was very easy to see exactly how much I was spending because there was a tally keeping track for me right on the screen. I know I am paying in some respect for the money the store is losing from the loss of those impulse sales. Plus I’m willing to pay a few dollars to support the service so that they have a big enough customer base to justify keeping it around, so that people who really do need it, like the elderly or those who are shut in their houses for medical reasons, can continue to have it as well. 

As far as negatives…

• I did accidentally order two kinds of bagels, which was totally my own fault, because I realized one was about half the price of the other brand and I forgot to take the first one out of my online shopping cart. And also I forgot to get milk. Both of those things are my fault. But both are also significantly less likely to happen in a regular grocery store where I could see the things in my shopping cart or the milk on the shelf that would trigger the thought, “Oh yeah, we also need milk.”  
• They did forget to bring my eggs, which I did not realize until this morning when I went to make my kids breakfast and I thought to myself, “I could have sworn I ordered eggs.” I checked my receipt and I did order them, but eggs were not in my delivery, so I guess I will have to call today to get that straightened out. Maybe they can put a credit back on the gift card I paid with. 
• I also thought the registration process for first time users, which was several pages long, was a bit clunky and might deter someone from an older generation who is not as savvy with computers. If you want to use this service for an older relative, I would recommend being there to walk them through the registration process and helping them place their first few orders. My one serious criticism is that I do wish it was a bit more user friendly for the elderly. Neither my grandmother or my great-grandmother, who both needed help with their grocery shopping before they passed away, could have used this service on their own. They just were not tech savvy. But my aunts or my mom or I could have definitely used it to place orders for them. 
• And I do wish it was easier to tell while ordering online which products support the Box Tops for Education program. Both of my older children’s schools are very into collecting box tops and it would be nice if those products were marked in some way. I found myself checking our pantry to see if a version we had in stock had a box top on it. 

Overall, since this is a relatively new service to our area, I would expect there to be a few minor bumps as we get used to each other, but me ordering extra bagels and them accidentally forgetting the eggs this time (which is a problem that can be easily fixed) are very small negatives in comparison to all of the overwhelming positives!

I was given a $75 gift card, just like the one I am giving away to one of you, and this is what I was able to get. My total, before tax and delivery was $74.93. My kids go back to school this week and it’s a little hectic around here, so I focused on a lot of things that can be packed into lunch boxes or made into quick and easy breakfasts or dinners. 

If you want to enter to win a $75 GIANT gift card to try Peapod delivery, enter using the Rafflecopter below. (We are in Pennsylvania. Click here to see if they deliver to your area.) Open to U.S. Residents ages 18 and up. 

a Rafflecopter giveaway

This is a sponsored post written by me on behalf of Peapod. All opinions are my own.