Snowshoe Delivery Service ~ groceries to go

Suzanne Stewart
Staff Writer

Three years ago, Beverly resident Aaron Friedman saw a need in the Snowshoe area – a need for groceries. In the wintertime, tourists who were unfamiliar with the area were coming to the mountain for a fun vacation, and they weren’t sure where to get provisions when needed.

This led Friedman to start Snowshoe Delivery Service. For its first two years, the business picked up and delivered groceries in the wintertime, but seeing the response to the service, Friedman expanded the business to year-round deliveries.

“We’re now seven days a week throughout the course of the year,” he said. “We just started that this past summer. The only day that we are closed is, obviously, a day that Walmart is closed, which is Christmas day.”

Friedman explained that the service delivers grocery orders from Walmart in Elkins to customers in the Snowshoe and Slaty Fork areas, as well as in Huttonsville and Valley Head in Randolph County.

The process is rather easy. Customers go to the website snowshoedelivery.com and click on the link to the Elkins Walmart. From there, they order their groceries and select a pickup time on the Walmart site. Then they log in to the Snowshoe Delivery Service Venmo page and pay the delivery fee. The customer then sends an email to the service to provide an address and the rest is up to the service.

“We swing into Walmart, we pick it up, we bring it straight to your door,” Friedman said.

While the business was initially started to help tourists, it has expanded to include county residents who need the service, as well.

“We’re getting more and more locals,” Friedman said. “We thought in the beginning it would be a huge need for visitors staying at Snowshoe, but, no, we’re getting a lot of locals that would rather not leave their house during winter storms or figure out that it costs just as much money for gas to drive [to the store].”

The service has four delivery vans in operation at this time and receives between 30 and 50 orders a day. The latest pickup time customers can select on the Walmart site is 1 p.m. At that point, the delivery drivers will pick up all orders for the day and will have them delivered between 1:30 and 3:30 p.m. the same day.

With the success the service has seen in the past three years, Friedman said he is considering expanding the delivery area, if there is an interest from residents.

“We’re going to test things out this summer, possibly pushing into Marlinton area, as well as Randolph County/ Elkins area,” he said. “We have plans to head out toward Canaan, as well. For right now, we’ve been pretty busy in Huttonsville, Valley Head, Snowshoe and Slaty Fork.”

For more information and delivery cost scale, visit snowshoedelivery.com