Norwegian supermarkets' approach to selling groceries online is to make a standard webshop and deliver the groceries on the next day.
There's greater mental overhead when you shop on the Internet than when you browse the isles. They don't seem to have put much effort into reducing that mental overhead. I also don't like that they can't deliver my groceries within the hour. Pizza can be delivered within the hour. Why not groceries?
I'm not quite sure why the mental overhead is greater when you shop on the Internet. I can think of a few things:
When you shop online, you're confronted with the entire selection of the store. If you perform a search, you must formulate a query. If you browse the categories, you must think about categories. Also, you can't inspect the item and must imagine what it's like from the pictures. Prices are more prominent, so you start thinking about those too. It all adds up.
@thor for me the mental overhead is far greater shopping in meatspace, FWIW.
@artsyhonker Well, people are different. I personally find it annoying to shop things like groceries online, because I'm never sure of what I want until I've had a look around. For me, it's like picking mushrooms, berries and fruit in a forest. I go into foraging mode. The bit I hate is the cash register and the journey home.
@thor I also do actual foraging, and find that is also less stressful than supermarket shopping.
I think it's the background noise etc that gets me.
I do almost always make a list, at least mentally, before grocery shopping; and saved lists online help me a lot.
@artsyhonker Ah, we don't have background music in our supermarkets. Also, nobody talks loudly. You just hear the sound of footsteps, the cash registers off in the distance, and the hum from the refrigerators and freezers.
@thor That's still a fair bit of noise.
You also probably have lower population density than here.
@artsyhonker Well, seeing as I live in the most densely populated area of the country, my day-to-day experience is probably similar to other urban localities. Even New York only gets denser than Oslo in certain hotspots, according to this interactive map: http://luminocity3d.org/WorldPopDen/
@artsyhonker Interestingly, hardly any other world city has a heat map like that (I looked). I've been to London. It definitely had more people per square kilometer, but the only part of it that felt more cramped than Oslo was the public transport system. It wasn't exactly a shock to the system. My AirBnB, a row house, was between Brixton Station, Loughborough Junction and Slade Gardens.
@artsyhonker I'm surprised that such a dense city as London even has room for row houses. In Oslo, they tend to go for condominiums because they're more space efficient.