Instacart and Alignment Healthcare will offer co-branded Medicare Advantage plans in 2024, which will allow participating consumers in qualifying counties to be reimbursed by Medicare Advantage, Medicaid and other eligible programs for “eligible groceries, wellness essentials and over-the-count drugs for delivery via Instacart.”
The pandemic got seniors to buy groceries online. That might not last.
Matthew Boyle
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When the pandemic hit the Brookdale Chambrel senior living community in Williamsburg, Virginia, Nancy Crowell knew hopping in the car and heading to the local Harris Teeter supermarket was out of the question.
The virus was spreading fast, and Brookdale s residents were being encouraged to stay put. Staff set up computers in the main common room and began teaching residents how to open online accounts to order groceries.
Crowell s first attempt to order from Kroger Co. s Harris Teeter chain failed, so the 85-year-old retiree switched to another local grocer s website only to discover an annoyance familiar to legions of online grocery shoppers: substitutions of her favorite brands and products. Once, I ordered a few ounces of bouillon and got a great big quart bottle, she said. It s still in my closet.
Drew Angerer via Getty Images
When the coronavirus pandemic swept the U.S. last spring, Community Foods Market in Oakland, California, turned to free delivery to encourage seniors to shop online.
“Even though we were doing kind of everything to keep our store clean and sanitized daily and limit traffic coming into the store, I just was not that comfortable with the idea of encouraging seniors to come out at what was the peak of the first [COVID-19] surge,” said Brahm Ahmadi, CEO and president of the store.
The store sits just a few blocks from two large senior living facilities and serves a senior population that has a high percentage of low-income people and households without cars, Ahmadi said.
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Reproductive Health Sales More than a year of pandemic living has dramatically reshaped how American households shop for groceries and other household essentials, said Laurentia Romaniuk, Instacart s Trends Expert and Senior Product Manager. As we analyzed twelve months of data from Instacart, we discovered that the pandemic has driven seismic demographic shifts in who is using online grocery, altered daily and weekly shopping rhythms, set off a wave of customer gratitude for the Instacart shopper community, and more. As the world inches toward normality, it appears that many of the new habits formed in the midst of the pandemic may actually be driving a permanent shift in how consumers shop.