I haven't done an in-person supermarket shopping trip since the Tuesday before Lockdown started. Obviously home delivery slots are difficult to get but Click and Collect slots are more feasible to acquire. No brand loyalty here, just whatever shop I can get a slot for every couple of weeks. (We aren't vulnerable enough to be on the shielding list getting priority for home deliveries, but have a higher risk than average so are taking all this very seriously)
Having done a Click&Collect with 4 different supermarkets, I wondered whether it might be valuable to share my experiences of the different policies and practices for the actual collection, specifically for how safe I felt their distancing policies were. YMMV obviously this is just my local branches and they may do things differently elsewhere.
ASDA - highly recommended. Absolutely minimal contact. They have an app that you can use to alert staff that you have arrived without even leaving the car. You park in a dedicated bay, and the staff member brings over the stack of crates then leaves without you even needing to wind down the window, and you can unpack the shopping from crates to car with full social distancing and absolutely minimal touching of things.
Tesco - not bad. Bonus points that the dedicated bay had a canopy over to protect from both blazing sun or rain. The goods were in a parked delivery van and a staff member was ready and waiting to take my name and fetch out my order. I did feel the staff member came a significantly closer than 2 metres from me (maybe 50cm?) when he was leaning in to get my name, but bonus points that the crates were placed in a row next to my car rather than in a stack, so I didn't even need to touch the crates. Substitution items were packed separately so it was easy to leave the unwanted substitute items untouched.
Sainsbury's - adequate with some features requiring improvement. High tech option to press a buzzer at the dedicated parking bay, which I didn't like as obviously requires you to touch a surface that has definitely been touched by numerous random people and is unlikely to have been cleaned recently. Several lost points due to poor management of substitution issues. Although the email instructions told me not to touch the shopping until the staff member had removed any unwanted substitutions, the staff member had no intention of doing so, and I had to ferret around for ages among 12 carrier bags to find the 4 unwanted items (could only find 3 of them anyway) and had no option but to leave them in the crate unattended (no sign of staff member by then)
But by far the worst score would be for Waitrose. No dedicated C&C area at all. Shock horror I actually had to park in the normal car park and go into the store, wait around at the customer service desk for someone to notice me, and then wait there some more while they fetched a stack of crates from store with all the hussle and bustle of supermarket activity going on around me, I then had to unload from the crates into a trolley (checking each bag for the unwanted substitute items, which the staff member then had to remove from the bag) and then take the trolley over to the car to load in. Whilst it wasn't very crowded and I didn't feel hugely at risk, I felt a lot less protected than I had been at any of the other shops over the past few weeks.
Are these typical of the shops listed or have you had very different experiences? Can anyone add details for any other supermarkets' Click&Collect option?