Estimate the true cost of grocery delivery with fees.
Grocery delivery has four charges and only two of them are visible. The delivery fee and the tip are stated plainly. The service fee, usually around five percent, is stated but easy to skim past. The fourth — an in-app markup on the item prices themselves, commonly five to fifteen percent above shelf price — is invisible unless you compare a receipt against the store. Because the markup is already inside the basket total, it has to be backed out rather than added, which is what this does before summing. The result is typically a twenty to twenty-five percent premium on an eighty-five dollar shop: convenience worth paying for on some weeks, but worth seeing as a number rather than as four separate small charges.
True cost of a delivered grocery order
Shelf value = basket total / (1 + markup / 100); markup amount = basket total - shelf value; service fee = basket total x service percent / 100; total premium = markup + service fee + delivery fee + tip
Because the prices you see in the app already include it. Adding it again would double-count — the correct step is to divide the basket by one plus the markup rate to recover what the same goods cost in store.
Compare the annual fee against the delivery fees alone, since subscriptions rarely remove the service fee or the markup. Break-even is usually somewhere around twenty to twenty-five orders a year.
Pick five items you buy regularly and compare in-app prices with the shelf. The gap is remarkably consistent within a retailer, so one check gives you a figure you can reuse.