Amazon Tests a Home-Delivery Service For Groceries 176
destinyland writes "Amazon.com is quietly trying to resurrect the failed business models of WebVan and HomeGrocer — two dotcoms which had offered home delivery of fresh groceries — with a new service called Amazon Fresh. Last week at a shareholder's meeting, Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos fielded questions about the current tests being conducted in Seattle. Bezos admitted Amazon is 'tinkering' with the economics of it, adding that 'we continue to think about that...We like the idea of it, but we have a high bar of what we expect in terms of the business economics for something like Amazon Fresh in terms of profitability and return on invested capital.' No further details were forthcoming, but Bezos still acknowledged that 'we continue to think about that.'"
Old news? (Score:3, Interesting)
I've been a Fresh customer for nearly two years now...
Re:It can succeed -- but it's a local business (Score:4, Interesting)
Many Safeway stores offer delivery. Not in my area of course, where we could really use it because it's the boonies, because, of course, it's the boonies.
News? Amazon's been testing Amazon Fresh since 07 (Score:2, Interesting)
Amazon has been testing their home grocery delivery service in Seattle since 2007. Initially it was for Amazon employees only. But it's been open to Seattle residents for years. I've been using it since probably 2009. So what's the news here?
Re:how many times (Score:4, Interesting)
Now, perhaps I'm missing something here, but I wasn't aware it had failed.
Is it's failure a US centric issue?
Early adopter anti-effect. The first delivery services were traditional dotcoms, in other words they (loudly) emerged, IPO'd, blew up, and sank, all in about 12 months around 1999. Early adopters make early judgments, therefore its set in stone that the entire market in 2011 is dead, because it died in 1999. So the opinion leaders think its a lead balloon and ignore it.
The masses just look at advertising budgets... the dotcoms spent most of their dough on ads, and failed. The current crop of (successful) delivery services are spending money on the backroom so that they actually work. However, if they only spend 1/100th the money on ads, then they can only be 1/100th as successful as the failed dotcoms, right, at least according to the masses. And the early adopters trash it (see above).
So growth is slow, yet seemingly inexorable.
What I would like to see (Score:4, Interesting)
It would be great if we could do away with purchasing things in bulk, i.e., buying a full bottle of a specialty spice even though you're just going to use half of a teaspoon of it, and instead just receive exactly what you need in general purpose containers (saving also the hassle of measuring it yourself). Especially as someone who likes to cook gourmet, I like to buy ingredients as near to when I'm using them as possible.
We could have "one-click recipes" where, instead of spending time locating ingredients, people can share their purchase orders with the associated recipes so anyone can get everything they need to duplicate it with a single mouse click.
Getting things to order, and in exact quantities, could also avoid the energy waste of everyone owning large personal refrigerators and freezers, besides avoiding the cost and environmental impact of fancy packaging, etc.
It becomes increasingly sensible the larger the scale of customers.