Milkmen and shopping deliveries
In recent years shopping and food deliveries to the door have become a lot more popular and common. Deliveroo, Uber Eats etc. But here in the UK we had a similar service decades before this. Milkmen!
Were Milkmen always more exclusive to the UK than anywhere else?
I know they had them in Australia, but were they common anywhere in Europe or elsewhere?
Milkmen were very common in the UK even in the 19th century, starting with horse drawn carts, and then in the 1960s using electric milk floats.. which were some of the first Electric EV vehicles. They were slow at about 20-30mph, but as they were only travelling door to door they didn't need to be fast. Only taking time from the depot to the first drop.
We always had a milkman growing up, as did most other people in the UK. Milk waiting for you when you got up, ready for your breakfast. In the 90s they started to offer extras you could add to your order such as Bread and pastries, and some seasonal things such as a bags of garden compost.
And we have continued to have a milkman ever since. It's just very convenient to have milk delivered. We get it every other day on Monday, Wednesday and Friday. And these days you can place orders on their website for extra grocery shopping to add to the next delivery or to add as a weekly addition. The selection is limited compared to full supermarket delivery service, but you can get anything from bread, butter, creme, breakfast cereal, bacon, eggs etc to Cat food. Handy if you discover you have run out of pet food at the last minute and don't want to go out to a store late at night. As long as we add extra items before 9pm they get delivered early the next morning. Our milkman normally delivers about 2am.
So did you have a milkman growing up or even still have one? Or was this almost exclusive to the UK? I know some places in the US and Australia have had home deliveries from Grocery stores for a long time.
And what about supermarket home deliveries? I think nearly every UK supermarket now offers home deliveries to a lot of areas, Sansburys, Morissons, Tesco, M&S, Waitrose etc.. and there are a few that are only home delivery such as Ocardo. Do you have similar home deliveries where you are?
When these first started to appear for the larger supermarkets like Tesco in the late 90's I used to see a neighbour getting their shopping delivered and thought it was really lazy. But now we get shopping delivered quite often. Maybe twice a month. We take advantage of new customer discounts so jump between different ones often. We also use my mother-in-laws address (as she only lives 1 mile away) to get deliveries sometimes to take advantage of big new customer discounts.
And with Covid home deliveries were literally a life saver for many who were self isolating. We used supermarkets and the quite delivery services like Deliveroo a lot at the time, and like many carried on after. But the smaller companies like Deliveroo do charge more for items than they are in the stores so you have to be careful. And you can't guarantee that everything you ordered actually gets included which can be annoying or also a problem if you are using a quick delivery service whilst making a meal and discover you have run out of something (because your teenage son has eaten it!)
I suppose one of the most tradition delivery services is takeaway restaurants. We have always used them for Chinese, Indian, Pizza, Kabab orders. Especially when delivery is free when your order is over a certain amount. Recently a lot of restaurants do use Uber Eats to send out the deliveries, and we have had some issues such as the driver taking ages to get the delivery to us (probably taking a fare on the way) or a couple of times they haven't picked up the whole order from the restaurant when it was in multiple bags.
Do you use supermarket deliveries? Are they a thing where you live? And do you use other delivery services like Deliveroo?
