All grocery stores are (somewhat literally) a mixed bag, and Berkeley Bowl West is a grocery store…read more It is one of two Berkeley Bowl stores, and is the one of the two I have the most experience with.
Berkeley Bowl West is celebrated for the vast variety of its produce. I like to shop as much as possible for organic items, and they definitely have fewer organic produce choices than non-organic; but there is still a reasonably large variety, of good quality. They have a nice variety of other kinds of items as well. Some prices are high, some are reasonable.
I've been requesting delivery orders since 2020, so my in-store experience is dated; but in early 2020 and previously, the parking lot was impossibly crowded every time we brought a car, and the store aisles were relatively narrow, making the store also feel crowded at pretty much all times, especially in the produce section.
Berkeley Bowl deliveries come from the Berkeley Bowl West store. Up until this month, they were a tolerable delivery option. I could order without creating an account, the orders would always arrive on time or early, they usually followed delivery instructions, and they were comparable to other delivery services in that I mostly got fresh produce and the items I ordered. Their team was responsive and nice if I got a wrong or defective item.
This month, they changed their website. It's possible that some people love the changes. In my opinion, it is a vastly inferior experience.
It's now mandatory to create an account in order to request a delivery, and they saved all of my data without permission! They used to tell you whether you were requesting produce by the pound or individual items; now you have to infer from the total cost of the item. The navigation system does not show all of the items in a category, at least when it comes to meat alternatives. The search for individual items isn't good either, but online store searches are often not great. It's unclear whether the system saves substitution preferences when you place an order. The system only recognizes certain types of addresses; if your address isn't in their system, for delivery or billing, then oh well. There doesn't seem to be any option to cancel an order. They have some unclickable edit buttons on your order page; why are they there if you can't actually edit that category?
On top of all of that, they added a five percent service fee, in addition to their delivery fee and driver tip. Depending on the size of your order, that is a significant increase in fees, and was a big shock when it appeared on the final page during checkout. With this new fee added, the total delivery cost for my order today (and my last order for a long, long time) was about forty dollars for four bags of normal groceries; no extravagant items. That's ten dollars per bag! That's a crazy high amount; definitely a splurge, not a normal way to buy groceries, in my opinion. (People with a much higher grocery budget may disagree.)
For comparison, if I was to rate other local stores, I would rate Safeway two stars, Whole Foods, El Cerrito Natural Grocery, and Good Eggs three stars, and Trader Joe's and Costco four stars. That's taking prices, delivery options, general staff morale, and item variety into account. Trader Joe's doesn't have delivery options (as far as I know), but everything else about their stores still averages out to a four, for me.
I will still shop at Berkeley Bowl West, but sparingly. I would be sad if they didn't exist. I really appreciate the variety, and the general professionalism of their small local chain. I really wish they would roll back their online shopping experience to how it was before they changed it in July. As it was, because of prices, I would request a delivery from Berkeley Bowl West once a month at most; it will now likely be once every four to six months. At some point I will probably go back to occasionally braving the crowds in the parking lot and in-store, and bypass the convenience of delivery altogether.
