If you need to replenish your stock of any random household item, but absolutely refuse to actually go to a store to accomplish that task, Amazon is the most obvious alternative. The company’s Prime service — specifically Prime Pantry — is the closest thing most of us will ever get to having a personal assistant run to the supermarket to buy us toilet paper, but now Target wants a slice of the pie, and its new Target Restock service just launched a pilot program that promises even faster delivery of the most basic products for the home.
Target Restock works a bit differently than any other next-day shipping service you’ve probably ever used. Instead of selecting just individual items and requesting them be sent, you get a box. Not a box of that item, but a box full of whatever products you can fit inside of it, and then that whole box is delivered the following business day for a flat fee of $4.99.
So, since the fee is the same whether you buy a single bottle of laundry detergent or an entire box of stuff full of snacks, cat litter, cereal, toilet paper, and whatever else, it actually ends up being a pretty reasonable stand-in for a trip to the store. That is, unless you really only need one thing, in which case it might not even be worth it.
The pilot program just launched in Minneapolis, and you need to be a Target REDcard holder in order to participate, but any Target devotees in the Twin Cities who want to try it out can do so on the Target Restock web portal.
