Frugal Friday: Keeping My Blood Pressure lower.

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in 2025 BJ’s “shipping” was unable to delivery correctly more than a dozen times which by the way is EVERY single order I was dumb enough to have shipped.

In 2025 Instacart correctly delivery – on time and usually in the first 10 minutes of the 2-hour window in 47 of 47 deliveries.

Yesterday, instead of spending useless time trying to get BJ’s and/or FedEx Ground to accept responsibility for misdelivered urgently needed items I did the math.

There are FIVE “bulk” items I buy every month from BJ’s.
for years we have maintained a separate Same Day Delivery account.

TWO of the five are no longer available thru Same Day Delivery “in this area” . And no, free shipping is not free if the product never reaches you and you are forced to find it elsewhere at a higher price.

So I did the math. Instacart for the win, again. I use Instacart for several reasons.

Now added to those reasons is keeping my blood pressure lower. Given the competition, at this time (Jan-2026) the monthly cost to use Instcart for my BJ needs is approximately $5-$10 per month.
– that means for $60 annually I am not aggravated by having to deal with repeated mis-delivery (for the records, BJ’s/FedEx-Redidential have not properly delivered any order in the past 18 months)

That means I can pay Instacart an additional $10-$120 and NOT use BJ’s delivery services.
And yes, I do keep track of what we use and buy whenever possible locally when on sale so that takes care of another dozen products I might have purchased from BJ’s

In 2025 it cost me an additional $150 in “lost” misdelivery that no one accepts responsibility for and would have been more except for kind folks who saw the package and brought it to our door. Full disclosure – after one other missing shipment that was valued at more than $100, they agreed to refund the $55 – and yes, we supplied images of their supposed delivery.

Looking 2025, IF I had used Instacart instead of BJ’s either shipping or same day delivery, the TOTAL added cost would have been $111 to Instacart instead of $100. Yeah for $11 – less than $1 a month, this delivery dependent person will not be renewing any delivery, Same day or shipping, thru BJ’s.

Rant over, at least for now.