Living In An On-Demand Economy

Grocery Delivery Service

Do you ever daydream that your grocery shopping could magically disappear? Do you ever have difficulty getting to a local store? Today your grocery list can turn into a few paper bags full of goods right outside your door.

Online grocery shopping is an excellent alternative if there’s any difficulty accessing a store. If you have any mobile difficulties, the ability to shop for food online can dramatically improve your lifestyle. There are quite a few resources that will provide this service. Our favorite is Instacart.

Instacart essentially feels like virtually grocery shopping. The site allows the user to choose grocery items from a participating store. The user fills up their online cart, and a delivery person will shop for you and deliver right to your door. If there is any difficulty with your order, say the store runs out of your go-to seltzer water, or has no fresh asparagus, the delivery aid will simply send you a message. The chat system is built into the app and will pop up as a notification on your device.

Instacart has a major benefit as it partners with local grocery stores around the U.S. For instance, Colorado’s favorite, King Soopers, is in conjunction with instacart. While opening the app, simply request King Soopers, and instacart will go to that location and shop for you.

An alternative app we also love is Postmates. Postmates started as a delivery service exclusively on bike in San Francisco in 2011. This app expands from groceries and can also deliver single goods from restaurants and stores. Postmates enables the user to track the delivery driver enabling you to order food for your family halfway across the country.

One last service: The competitor to Postmates, Amazon’s delivery partnership with Whole Foods. Now that Amazon has teamed up with Whole Foods, you can now order same-day delivery with an Amazon Prime account. This service is only for Whole Foods and can be for any item available at your local store.

Online Table Reservations

While enjoying a night out at your favorite restaurants, there are plenty of opportunities to save the trouble of waiting in a long line, or not being able to hear the staff on the other end of the phone during a busy meal hour. When researching a place to eat, reserving a spot online can ease the process of eating out.

The go to reservation app is OpenTable. Opentable can be found in a few different ways. You can go to the site or app itself, or find this service on Yelp, Google and sometimes the restaurant's website itself.

OpenTable offers a simple approach to restaurant reservations. The app will display available times in boxes. All you have to do is choose a date and time and get your taste buds ready - it’s that easy.

Online Ticket Ordering

There’s no easier way to kill your Saturday night plans than to show up to a sold out movie. With online ticket reservations with services like Fandango your plans will never be sold out.

Fandango is an app for your smart device that allows you to view movie times and purchase tickets, making your moving going experience as simple as possible.

After downloading the app, you’ll enter your location so the closest theaters can be located. You can search for your most anticipated movie or preferable movie theater. The app also offers a point system called VIP+. Every 500 points earned you’ll gain $5 in rewards. This app knows how to hook you in!