An idea for Grofers

I just got an order delivered from Grofers. It was the second time that I used the service and I already know what I like about it the most. It makes me feel less guilty.

No, I am not the fat, lazy husband that they depict in their ads, feeling guilty about not contributing to the household work. I am an individual who is conscious about the excessive use (or should I say abuse) of plastic bags in our daily lives.

I generally try to avoid using plastic bags as much as I can and am mindful of when I end up asking the shop for one. Most of the time, it when buying groceries that I end up asking for a plastic bag. I have thought about why this happens and it mostly happens because most of my grocery shopping is unplanned spur of the moment thing, which is why I am not always carrying my own bag when I end up at the local kirana store and end up asking for one.

With Grofers, the spur of the moment shopping happens on the app rather than going to the store. And they deliver the goods in nice environment friendly bags. So when the bread and eggs they delivered today did not come in a plastic bag, I was happy. The one use case, the spur of the moment grocery shopping, where I invariably ended up using plastic bags, now had an alternative user experience where I could get what I wanted within a reasonable time without having to use plastic bags. I used the term user experience because from a design perspective buying from an app should be as friction less as buying from a grocery store.

However, as I emptied the environment friendly Grofers bags, I realized that I already had the couple of bags stowed away from the last time that I ordered and that I really did not need the bags from the second order. It made me wonder, why does Grofer not take back the bags and recycle/re use them. I mean the delivery guy is right there and I could have handed it to him. Environment friendly is not simply less plastics but also recycle and reuse. Perhaps, Grofers could hand out reward points to customers who return bags and thus encourage environment friendly behavior.