In August 2015, shoppers at the Weis Markets store at 740 South Broad Street in Lititz noticed two new signs in the parking lot. They marked spaces reserved for customers picking up groceries they had ordered online. The spaces sat next to the store’s horse-and-buggy parking area, a very Lancaster County juxtaposition of old and new ways of getting home from the market.
Weis, the Sunbury-based supermarket chain, had chosen the Lititz store as one of the locations to launch its online shopping and pickup service. At the time, ordering groceries online for pickup was still unusual outside large metro areas.
How it worked
Customers placed orders online and either paid through a secure online system or at the store during curbside checkout. Trained personal shoppers picked each order by hand in the store, then held it until the customer arrived.
The service was free on orders of $150 or more and cost $2.95 on smaller orders, with the fee waived on a customer’s first order. Shoppers could use their Weis Preferred Shopper cards to get sale prices and earn fuel rewards, and they could browse the weekly circular online and add sale items directly to their carts.
For busy families, the appeal was obvious: no aisles, no checkout lines and groceries loaded into the trunk in a few minutes.
Ahead of the curve
When the Lititz service started, online grocery shopping was a small fraction of food sales nationwide. Most grocery chains were experimenting with it in a few stores, testing whether customers would trust someone else to pick their produce and meat.
That changed dramatically in 2020. When the pandemic arrived, demand for grocery pickup and delivery soared almost overnight, and stores that already had systems in place were better prepared. Weis expanded its pickup service across its chain, and competitors raced to catch up. Third-party delivery services such as Instacart grew rapidly as well.
Today, ordering groceries online for pickup is routine in Lititz, and the borough’s shoppers can choose among several stores offering curbside service.
The shift also changed jobs inside stores. Personal shoppers, once a novelty, became a standard role at many supermarkets, and back rooms were reorganized with staging areas and coolers to hold orders until customers arrived.
Tips for using grocery pickup
If you are new to online grocery ordering, a few habits make it work better:
- Allow substitutions carefully. Most services let you approve or reject substitutes for out-of-stock items. Set preferences for items you care about.
- Order early for busy times. Pickup slots before holidays and snowstorms fill quickly.
- Check your order at pickup. It is easier to fix a missing item at the curb than after you get home.
- Watch the fees. Pickup is often free or low-cost above a minimum order, while delivery usually costs more.
- Plan around the clock. Many stores need several hours of lead time, so place orders the night before for a morning pickup.
- Use the loyalty card. Sale prices and fuel points generally apply to online orders as well.
A Lititz grocery landscape
Weis on South Broad Street is one of several grocery options for Lititz-area shoppers, alongside other supermarkets on the borough’s south end, along Route 501 and in nearby communities. Many residents also buy produce, meat and baked goods from farm stands and markets across northern Lancaster County, where local farms sell directly to customers much of the year.
The horse parking at the Lititz Weis remains a reminder that in this part of Pennsylvania, many shoppers still arrive by buggy, and the store serves both kinds of customers.
For more Lititz business news, see our Business section.