The Dark Side of Disney - Leonard Kinsey [22]
But the best thing about grocery delivery is that they will deliver booze! This alone usually makes up ¾ of my bill from Wegoshop, because I absolutely love coming back to the room at night and relaxing on the balcony with a few cold beers. And then I come inside and lie on the bed and watch Stacey running through all of the parks, being perkily annoying (her last name is Aswad!) yet somehow hot (especially in a bikini and pigtails during the Typhoon Lagoon section), and I’ll have a few more beers. And then I’ll sit in the Jacuzzi and drink some more beer. And then I’ll go to sleep, but not before having another beer. I’m on vacation, dammit! As you can imagine, if I bought this much beer from WDW I’d be out of cash the first day of the trip, so the grocery delivery places are a godsend. I also know people who buy margarita mix and bottles of tequila from Wegoshop, mix the margaritas in their room, poor it all into a large thermos, and bring it to the pool for a relaxing day of poolside drunkenness.
Tip: If you do run out of alcohol from the grocery delivery place (or never ordered it to begin with and are rapidly running out of cash) you can walk over to the Hess gas station across from The Boardwalk and buy beer for cheap there, although their selection sucks. There is also a Hess station across the street from Downtown Disney. You can take WDW buses to either DTD or The Boardwalk, and from experience even though the bus drivers will give you dirty looks when you hop on board with a case of Heineken, they won’t stop you from getting on.
Of course, grocery delivery assumes you’ve taken my advice and are staying in a swank DVC room, and thus have at least a fridge, coffee maker, toaster, and microwave to store and reheat your leftovers, snacks, and breakfast food. But maybe you’re scared of renting points or just really love Pop Century, and you don’t have any of that stuff in your room. Turns out you’re not exactly out of luck: both the Value and Moderate resorts have microwaves and toasters available for communal use in the food courts, Moderates have fridges and coffee makers in the room, and if you’re staying at a Value you can rent a fridge from Disney for $10/day, although that sort of defeats the purpose of trying to eat cheaply.
Or, you can participate in a “fridge swap” via an online forum like Disboards (in the Budget Board subforum). The way a fridge swap works is that a group of people staying at a particular resort in the near or distant future pool together $10 or so each to purchase a small fridge from Walmart, which is shipped to the resort, addressed to the first person in line for the swap, or picked up from the store if the person has rented a car. That person keeps the fridge for the length of their vacation and then brings it down to Luggage Services, where it is stored until the next person in the swap arrives and picks it back up (alternately, if the two families’ trips overlap, they can make the swap in person using a luggage cart). This way, everyone in the swap gets a fridge for the length of their vacation for $10 total, instead of $10/day! Sometimes other small appliances are purchased and stored inside the fridge between swaps, such as toasters and coffee machines.
For the most part this works out really well; for whatever reason Disney hasn’t cracked down on it yet, and Luggage Services seems to be more than happy to store and cart around heavy appliances as long as they get a decent tip. However, there have been fridge swaps gone wrong, resulting in some hilariously epic threads where a fridge gets lost (i.e., someone leaves it in their room without bothering to bring it back down to Luggage Services) and the rest of the people in the swap group who already chipped in for it get screwed. You’d think their firstborn had been kidnapped