Please add whole foods or berkeley bowl or some other place with decent produce (nob hill in MV is ok) -- Safeway is great for national packaged food, Trader Joe's for private label frozen stuff, but both are weak for produce, meat, fish, deli, etc.
A drug store might also be good, although Safeway probably has enough of a selection for OTC medication, cleaning/etc. supplies, etc.
For produce, why not order it directly from farms?
We live in downtown San Francisco and get our organic produce delivered weekly from http://farmfreshtoyou.com
We've been using it for more than a year and have been happy with it, that said I'd be curious to hear other suggestions, specially services that deliver organic produce from a group of farms instead of only one.
Instacart is about "oh shit, I ran out of x and y for use in the next few hours, but if I go to the store I will miss my party or not get work done or not make e other items". If I had a week to plan, it would be different.
Yeah - CSAs have their place, but you are constrained to local vegetables in season, and often you don't know more than a day in advance what you are getting. They are great for supporting localvorism, but it doesn't cover the "hey come round to my place tomorrow, I'll cook a green curry - oh hell I need japanese eggplants".
Frankly vegetables and bread are the main thing I would want delivered quickly and often - pantry staples I can stock up in one big monthly trip, it's not really a big deal to fit that in.
Pantry staples are generally fine if you have decent inventory tracking. The problem is when you've started something and realize "oh, shit, we're out of salt...the big box we thought was full behind this one was empty/spoiled/etc."
Instacart also makes a lot of sense in groups, where no one individually wants to be responsible for going for stuff. Parties, roommates, or offices.
The problem with fish/produce/etc. is there's variation on offer. If I go to the store and want some tuna steaks, but see hamachi is on sale, I might get that instead. It would be hard to delegate that level of decision making to anyone who wasn't a routine agent, or having an exceptionally good CRM, or having a realtime inventory system at the store.
What I'd love if if someone could get Tokyo Fish Market in Berkeley, a few farmers markets, etc. to publish realtime inventory info, and do a buying trip once a day. Go in in the morning, see exactly what is there and at what price, let me know, and then I'll let you know in an hour or so what I'll buy. Specialized restaurants do this already (e.g. sushi chef goes to the fish market), but maybe smaller places would be more likely to do it for ancillary items if they could use tech to do it for them, or home cooks would do it. Most restaurants just use food service companies like SYSCO for most of their stuff now, though.
99 Ranch is also great. It's not as high quality for fish as Tokyo Fish Market, but good, and definitely cheap. If I were in the South Bay I'd shop there a lot more.
A drug store might also be good, although Safeway probably has enough of a selection for OTC medication, cleaning/etc. supplies, etc.