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...
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My hovercraft is full of eels! :(
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Sadly we can't get fresh eels this far inland.
Also, the margins on the grocery business are insanely low, especially in produce. If you can't make it up on volume you can't make it. I speak from five years of reading "shrink" reports and competing with other stores to have the highest profitability. For which you're lucky to get a pat on the back, and I know of people that were literally hospitalized from job stress.
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But not, alas, in the food industry. The retail grocers have been taking it in the shorts for a long time, but if you're making cornflakes, you're raking it in.
The food business in the US is a strange mixture of big corporations that operate on very fat margins, and local and smaller outfits that barely scrape by.
Not surprisingly, Wal-Mart does very well with their grocery business. For those that don't have a conscience or sense of social responsi
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Not surprisingly, Wal-Mart does very well with their grocery business. For those that don't have a conscience or sense of social responsibility or concern about the lives of their children and future generations, I guess Wal-Mart would be a preferred place to buy food.
Wow, why do you hate small businesses so much?
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Yeah, people always say this, but it seems that lots of other places sell at least *some* groceries. I'm not even counting things like WalMart and Target.. "Drugstores" like CVS & RiteAid seem to sell a decent amount of groceries, even some refrigerated stuff. (Are they usually higher priced than a regular grocery store? Yes, I think so, but even they have sales, possibly loss-leaders, that are very good sometimes.)
Conversely, people seem to
People want to know (Score:4, Funny)
Re:People want to know (Score:5, Funny)
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At least once a year there is kosher for Passover coke and pepsi, made with real sugar.
Of course those years with two Passovers in them are not fun at all.
This isn't a new test. (Score:3, Informative)
AmazonFresh has been around Seattle for several years. IIRC, Amazon bought out HomeGrocer and rebranded it.
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Between AmazonFresh and Safeway, grocery delivery is hardly a new thing in Seattle.
Two minutes on Wikipedia shows that they did their "beta-test" on Mercer Island back in 2007, and have expanded to cover Seattle, Bellevue and Kirkland.
Example. (Score:1)
Bit expensive, but already available country wide in the Netherlands, works fine really.
www.albert.nl/
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Ditto in Luxembourg.
http://www.luxcaddy.lu/ [luxcaddy.lu]
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Very competitive market in the UK. Asda (Walmart), Tesco, Ocado (John Lewis Partnership) to name a few.
Doesn't cost much more, I actually make a saving as I do not impulse buy when I see things on special offer.
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Yup. I've unfortunately at the moment not got access to a car, as well as health problems, and there isn't a local shop in this village.
To get my weekly shopping done, otherwise I'd have to get on a bus, and spend $5 or so getting into town and back.
I can shop online at Tesco, pay the same price as in-store, and order anything, for a delivery of $5 or so.
In addition, it lets me get bulk buys of staples, when they are on special offer, which would be totally impossible on the bus.
For example - last order was
how many times (Score:2)
can this idea fail?
It can succeed -- but it's a local business (Score:5, Informative)
Some packaged grocery items can benefit from national distribution and shipping, but lots of stuff -- produce, meats, cheeses, prepared foods, etc. -- need to be staged (and in some cases, sourced and/or prepared) locally, in a refrigerated facility, then delivered in refrigerated trucks. That means this kind of service will only be available in places where Amazon invests in infrastructure to support it. And that probably means denser metropolitan regions, where there's enough of a customer base in a small area to make the investment cost-effective.
There's a grocery delivery company called FreshDirect that services the NYC area; I've had good experiences with them. But they've been refining and building their business for years. Originally they only served certain neighborhood in Manhattan (their main warehouse is in Queens, just over the 59th St. bridge from midtown Manhattan). Now, years later, they have expanded to serve all 5 boroughs, and some areas outside the city. But this expansion was very slow and deliberate, as they built up their capacity, trained their workforce, etc.
Re:It can succeed -- but it's a local business (Score:4, Insightful)
P.S. FreshDirect probably benefits from certain unique features of the New York City metro area -- not only the incredible density of the population, but the relatively low percentage of car ownership.
If my wife and I owned a car, we might go to the supermarket ourselves more regularly. As it is, we shop at various local mom-and-pop groceries ("bodegas" in NYC parlance) and a CVS drugstore that we can walk to in our Brooklyn neighborhood, and supplement that with FreshDirect orders every 2-3 weeks.
We have a couple of supermarkets within a 15-minute walk, but it's much easier to order the supermarket-type stuff for delivery.
There are very few places in the US with comparably low rates of car ownership. Even in other dense cities, it's much more common for people to own at least 1 car. Most of our friends in NYC (well-educated professional and creative types) are carless. Walking, public transit, and occasional cab use are more than adequate, and IMO, much preferable.
Re:It can succeed -- but it's a local business (Score:4, Informative)
I'm curious to see walking, transit and cab use mentioned but cycling left out; is utility cycling uncommon in New York? If so, could you speculate as to why?
My wife and I live in Austin and go supermarket shopping fairly regularly -- her with her handbuilt cargo bike (steel frame, belt drive; front basket, large rear panniers, large basket mountable above them), me with my Bike Friday Tikit (and, for Costco trips, a 200lb-capacity cargo trailer running behind it). Finding a secure place to store the trailer looked like it might be an issue when we were moving into our current condominium, but the former owner got a statement from the board that it would be welcome in the regular bicycle parking under the stairs.
Then again, here in Austin, I've never been more than a few miles from the nearest grocer -- though the HEB just a few blocks from our current location is somewhat limited on selection, the Whole Foods landmark and headquarters is in easy cycling distance for occasions when we need something more exotic (and neither objects to the Tikit being used as a shopping cart when wheeled around folded with its pannier open; at Costco, by contrast, I've made a habit of locking up the trailer in the copious and mostly unused bike parking and bringing the bike inside folded in my cart).
Cycling in NYC (Score:2)
> I'm curious to see walking, transit and cab use mentioned but cycling left out; is utility cycling uncommon in New York? If so, could you speculate as to why?
A few people do it, but it's not all that common. For one thing, as another commenter said, full-size supermarkets are fairly rare; we mostly have corner groceries, and some undersized supermarkets. Upscale chains like Whole Foods and Trader Joes are starting to penetrate the city, but they still serve relatively few people, mostly in certain Ma
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We have that here too. In terms of what
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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.
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I just used the Safeway home delivery for the first time, a couple of weeks ago, and I'm happy with my experience. While the delivery charge was $7 (but can go up to $13 for a 1-hour delivery window or certain times of the day), I figured that the $7 was worth it for my time and gas. A big plus was that (in my area, at least) the delivery driver refused any tip, and so that makes home delivery fairly competitive with doing the shopping yourself. You do, of course, need to do a fairly large order to make
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All this will work better when we can do it with RFID, I don't want to have to hold everything up so that it can be scanned as I bin it. Yes, I am that lazy. For the mean time you can order all the dry goods online and generate a shopping list for everything else.
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NYC is one of the few places it can succeed, in fact I would expect it to boom and not take years to meet demand so that kind of hints of what market your looking at
now move to the rest of the country, all of a sudden your not driving a few miles to fill hundreds of orders, your driving tens of miles though numerous towns just to deliver some potatoes and a gallon of milk
or in other words, it just does not make since for the majority
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Just coordinate with the grocery stores. Half of them have delivery trucks already, I'm sure they'd love to have someone else handle all that for them, plus have a cut of someone else serving online orders. Why the fuck is this so hard?
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Re:how many times (Score:5, Informative)
Amazon.com is quietly trying to resurrect the failed business models of WebVan and HomeGrocer
aka the same successful business model of peapod.com. Talk about trashing the service by carefully selected comparisons with failures. Disclaimer, I'm a very happy peapod customer, although I haven't ordered recently. When we had two newborns, medical issues, and an utterly packed schedule, it was a lifesaver (maybe literally, in terms of food quality vs the alternative of pizza delivery every day or whatever). I also greatly enjoyed shopping online vs in the store because of the "log in and work on the order for 5 minutes each day" ability. Also the experience of shopping while reading a cookbook, or at weird times of day, was oddly pleasurable.
can this idea fail?
About as many times as mom and pop restaurants fail, superficially the number is about infinite. I suspect you can realistically raise capital to do about one every couple years, and it'll be economically feasible to use diesel delivery trucks for only another decade or two, lets say another 10 times.
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Re:how many times (Score:4, Informative)
Now, perhaps I'm missing something here, but I wasn't aware it had failed.
Is it's failure a US centric issue?
The reason I ask is here in the UK we've had home delivery for years, and pretty much every supermarket offers it.
It's highly succesful here and even Occado which is a home delivery only brand with no high street presceience I believe is even turning a decnt profit at last.
Perhaps companies in the US are just doing it wrong? I understand it'd be an issue in some parts of the US because of the distances involved, but certainly most of the UK is covered by such services and I see little reason why major population centres in the US at the very least couldn't have a similarly succesful model.
So is it just the US it's failed in? has it failed in other countries? In the countries it's failed in what were seen to be the causes?
Here's it's great, if you've got a busy week just order online during work and have it delivered in a 2hr timeslot such as say 8pm - 10pm one evening, even the next day, when you know you'll be home.
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.
Re:how many times (Score:4, Funny)
Is it's failure a US centric issue?
The only part of the UK with lower population density than the USA is the Pitcairn islands.
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Is it's failure a US centric issue?
The only part of the UK with lower population density than the USA is the Pitcairn islands.
I donno about that. OP describes it as "UK" not downtown London.
I live in a rural / suburban county about 20 miles from "the big city" with 650 people/sq mile. Think of an environment of very small cities and villages surrounded by dairy farms, theoretically no one is ever more than one mile from a cow, etc. Wales only has 360 people/sq mile, per wikipedia. Wales population is about twice that of my county... so twice the people in half the density means wales is about 4 times the land area. Nothing ev
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As an interesting point of comparison, New York State is approximately the same size as England, but with half the population.
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It's a fair point but it's also worth pointing out that many of the US' major cities including Phoenix have much better road systems than the UK and fuel costs half as much.
In the UK we're stuck with expensive fuel (again, twice that of the US), and a roman road system.
I'm sure in many US cities this would certainly counteract the lower population density in making it feasible to at least some extent.
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At some point, it's not going to be economic. ...
To do it right, you need to do it BIG.
Start off at the end of the delivery - at least 10 minutes per customer is going to be spent dropping off the groceries, finding the address,
Let's say the ideal situation is where you've got enough customers that the average drive is 5 minutes, and you can fit 30 customers deliveries in your van.
(from the size of the vans they use here)
That works out to about an 8 hour shift - which seems logical.
Cost per customer is of t
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The vast majority of Australia's population is located in one of a handful of centers, and virtually everyone else is located along a corridor between them. The population of the USA is spread out across the country as more of it is considered habitable.
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Is it's failure a US centric issue?
Size.
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I am not sure, but the difference between the way it works in India(though its on the phone and not online) and US, is that in India you call up your local supermarket/grocery store, and they deliver.
In US, you order from a company like Amazon, where Amazon needs to set up a seperate delivery infrastructure, which is not needed if you live within 15 mins of the supermarket.
Perhaps UK follows something similar to the Indian model and not the US model?
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Perhaps UK follows something similar to the Indian model and not the US model?
Sounds like it. You place your order through the supermarket website, it is passed to your local delivery branch (which is a perfectly normal supermarket that has a few refrigerated vans) which fills the order.
If your supermarket of choice doesn't have a delivery branch within range of your address (increasingly rare), then they won't take the order.
This makes rolling out such a system very easy. The branches already had computers that connected to head office; all they need is:
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Correct in the UK for all the supermarkets (Tesco, Asda, Sainsbury's, etc) but not for Ocado.
Tesco do have at least one "picking centre" in South London (Croydon), although this is basically a supermarket with no customers - they still push trollies down the aisles to pick up whatever's on your lis
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That's how it started off in the UK but it has changed somewhat now at least with ASDA.
In Yorkshire for example ASDA used to do it as you say- from local supermarkets as the bases, but now they have a large distribution centre near Leeds which they cover most of Yorkshire from.
Either way seems to work though, I guess ASDA just figured they could do it cheaper by centralising it, at least in Yorkshire.
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It hasn't, most metro areas are covered by services like Peapod and FreshDirect.
The submitter was being an idiot for no reason.
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What do you consider the word 'most' to mean?
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Pretty much. The UK has 12 times the population density we have in the US. Not only are the customers further apart, but also almost everyone has a car. Home delivery can probably work in a handful of denser US metro areas (some of them already have it), but I'll be shocked if anyone ever makes it work in the smaller cities or suburbs.
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How many times can it succeed? Here in the UK every major supermarket chain has online-order-and-deliver models and they work out just fine.
Whether it makes sense for Amazon is less clear. As others have pointed out, books can be posted from a central warehouse while groceries need a local distribution infrastructure - hence why Amazon has only trialled this in Seattle instead of nation-wide. The supermarket chains have an established distribution network, and all it needs is a website and local delivery
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while groceries need a local distribution infrastructure
You meant to write:
while FRESH groceries need a local distribution infrastructure
I would think a box of dried pasta and a bottle of pasta sauce could be mailed to me from south Dakota just about as easily as a SATA hard drive. The stuff that needs refrigeration already has a local distribution infrastructure that serves numerous (competing) retail sites.
I was tangentially involved in the "local distribution infrastructure" for in-grocery-store deli's about 25 years ago... Most of the stuff at a deli is delivered by a local with a truck who drops the same stuff off at
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The idea didn't fail, the implementation did. The problem with Homegrocer.com/Webvan was that they tried to expand too aggressively. My parents got it a couple times, and it worked well.
The idea itself was really common in the US up until relatively recently when everybody started owning their own cars, grocery stores would offer delivery of any groceries you bought. Even today, I know of several local grocers that offer delivery, albeit for a fee.
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well there is a difference tween the country store and catering to millions of people in a region, thats where it fails every time
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Not really. It's not a tough thing to solve logistically. You need warehouses and a fleet of refrigerated vehicles. In the past it was tough to do, but if you've already got the supermarkets there, it's not much of a challenge logistically to pick up the groceries and deliver them.
Apart from the cases where they had a clearly inept business plan, I'm not aware of any significant failures. The service works more often than it doesn't if you plan for reasonable expansion, rather than trying to take over the w
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It's not a luxury service. I know that the albertsons version they charge $10 for delivery or $5 for them to get it ready for pick up, but if you're able to work an hour you've just made back the cost. And that's even at minimum wage.
The idea that this is a luxury is really misleading as it ignores the things that one could be doing with ones time, including finding other ways of saving money which would lead to a net gain for the household over doing it yourself.
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Luxury may be exaggerating a bit, but it certainly only seems worth it to me for someone buying for a huge family all at once. It isn't cost effective for one person. I don't even like shopping, but don't want to pay extra to deliver it to me. e.g. even when Amazon is delivering something to me, it's cheaper or the same price as other options, including shipping, since I batch up things until I have a $25 purchase to get free shipping.
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Wait, what is the luxury part of having groceries delivered? All the stores I've ordered from have always charged $5 or $10. That's not "lots of money" when you factor in the fact that I don't have to use my car. Don't have to use gas. And don't have to spend an hour or two every week doing it. Fuck, it costs at least $5 in tips and fees just to have a pizza delivered.
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?
Bwuh? Old news? (Score:4, Informative)
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For absolute hilarity, imagine slashdot editors delivering groceries.
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For absolute hilarity, imagine slashdot editors delivering groceries.
Cowboy Neal delivers my groceries, you insensitive clod!
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You'd get a lot of duplicate orders. Then again, you might get double-billed a lot too.
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Well that depends. You can offer pretty much any service you like as long as you're "tinkering" and willing to lose money. If, after four years, it's still not making money then yeah, "failed" is probably the right way to characterize it.
Two things (Score:3)
And fresh food delivery is a proximity service. There are plenty of no-name who've replaced webvan with success. A colleague buys from the local supermarket via Internet. He says it's very convenient: there's a list of recurrent products that you setup once and when you order you can always check them off and add whatever else you want. He says that his weekly internet shopping doesn't take more than 5 minutes. Going to that supermarket in the flesh is a strange experience: there are more teenagers running through the aisles like crazy to fulfill the web orders than there are live customers.
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there are more teenagers running through the aisles like crazy to fulfill the web orders
Can't say I've even seen one here (NH) - you're seeing this in CO?
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Convenience versus cost (Score:2)
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Most of the local grocery stores that offer that service do it for a fixed fee or free with a minimum order. Sort of the pizza delivery model. I don't know the pricing structure for all of them, but Albertsons offers two levels of service, home delivery for $10 and pick up for $5, which is actually a pretty good deal, depending upon your situation. You can often times use that time to work or cut costs in other areas, yielding a bit of savings.
For parents in particular being able to pick up the kids an hour
How is it a failed business model? (Score:2)
The submission is positioned as if the idea of delivering groceries is a concept that has repeatedly failed. I'd like to know what justification there is for that statement. Yeah, Webvan/Homeshop and Peapod seem to have failed years ago, but I and plenty of other people have been ordering our groceries online from Albertsons, Safeway, and Kingsoopers for at least a decade, now. When I lived in San Francisco, I used Webvan in the late 90s. When I moved back to Portland, I used Albertsons and Safeway until th
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Peapod seem to have failed years ago
Reports of their demise seem to be greatly exaggerated. Did they pull out of your county? I know they roll out on a county by county basis, never heard of them pulling out of a county before. They're still willing to deliver to me, anyway.
I don't have to set aside a couple hours a week to drive to the store, find parking, get a cart, go up and down the aisles, deal with people and their tantrum-throwing kids, wait through lines, load up the car, come back home, unload and put away the groceries.
The only thing worse than dealing with other people's tantrum throwing kids is dealing with your own tantrum throwing kids...
My favorite part of the peapod experience was spending 5 minutes each day optimizing my weekly order, right up till the night before delivery. N
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But the idea that delivering groceries is a dumb one is just absurd.
Delivering groceries is not absurd, but the infrastructure needed to support this is likely absurdly expensive. Existing grocery chains like Safeway have a huge advantage in that they already have most of the infrastructure needed to support home delivery (and, as you know, Safeway already does this). For them, it's probably just a matter of creating a web storefront tied into local inventory, and hiring some delivery drivers/stockclerks.
(Side note: Amazon probably needs to resolve the internet sales tax
Everything old is new again (Score:3)
We live in a fairly rural area of western Washington state, and we subscribe to a home delivery service offered by a dairy - something that's been going on in the US for probably a century. The products they offer are somewhat limited - the usual eggs and milk, butter, sour cream - but they do carry a few "extras" like whole bean coffee and cookie dough.
I know a number of competitors have died off over the past couple of decades - Smith Brothers seems to be the last man standing in this area. For now they apparently are doing okay. But part of the reason they are still around is their prices are somewhat high. We think it's worth it, since the quality of their products is superb - but for most people price is paramount. They don't care that the grocery store's milk is watery and has a funny aftertaste, as long as the price is low.
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.
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Anyone who knows anything about cooking knows that properly stored bottled spices are
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They already have something like this, it's called delivery. Seriously, by the time you actually metered out the stuff(and you would still have to package it btw) combined it into one order and delivered it, you would wind up spending at least as much, if not more, than i
I'd do it in a hearbeat- (Score:2)
Heck, I'd even do it if I had to drive to a local spot and pick them up. Why? Because I'm sick and tired of having to goto one local store (Wegmans) with their idea of sale prices - 2 for $5....
Let me order or queue what I need during the week and I'll decide when to go get it. No lists, no coupons.
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At least one company still in operation (Score:2)
god i hope this pans out. (Score:2)
I don't really know, but I always thought it was the delivery side of things that killed it economically. I'd settle for local pick up points. Place order online, show up when it's ready and grab your stuff. Still a huge time saver. Would love to see a local store offer this, have a couple of people prep orders for you to pick up at the store.
You don't have to replace the grocery store (Score:2)
You just have to cherry pick profitable business from it. Not only is that going to be more profitable, it might provide a better user experience.
Let's take coffee. My house buys a lot of coffee. It's one of the things that might instigate a trip to the grocery store. One of our family members is lactose intolerant, and lactase pills are another market drip driver. A lot of that stuff could just show up on our doorstep every couple of weeks. Occasionally we'd have to go out for extra coffee if guests were c
Onlike grocery delivery can work... (Score:2)
But for it to be successful, it has to:
1.Have minimum order requirements to stop someone ordering a pack of chips and a bottle of soda and nothing else.
2.Not try to roll delivery costs into item prices. Charges actual costs for delivery from wherever the local warehouse/delivery point is.
3.Have prices and range (including fresh fruit and veg, meat, bakery, dairy etc) that are comparable to what one finds in a local supermarket.
Get that right and people who are willing to trade money (delivery costs) for tim
Food delivery in Ukraine since 90s (Score:2)
I used the service at least from 1997 without interruptions.
When my wife was sick after a surgery and I had to work 12 hours a day, it was very convenient.
Nowadays, my father-in-law, who is 81, orders items, which he cannot carry himself anymore, like bottled water, juice, rice, vegetables, fruits, etc. If it were not for this delivery service he would not be able to st
Because American's just aren't fat enough already (Score:2)
While it sounds like a REALLY GREAT business idea.... and I'm sure it will take off... it'll take off for the wrong reasons. The poor bastard delivering the groceries will get to the house and there will be a sign on the door "The
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I play soccer and basketball. I have games and practices to attend weekly. My son is currently competing in track and soccer, he also has games and practices to attend weekly. My wife is working on her Master's Degree while working full time in her field.
This while attending to her elderly parents, being responsible home owners, and responsible parents!
I would _gladly_ pay to free up that two hours a week, or so, we use for grocery shopping!
So while your post was funny, and even partly true, it certainly do
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Reclusive, eccentric former dotcom millionaires. Who else lives in Seattle?
You are wrong (Score:2)
"This doesn't save you the time of shopping, as you still have to select what you want"
Huh? Do you actually grocery shop? Do you really understand where they put everything? Let's say you are looking for beans. There are beans in 5 different aisles in the store, are you going to pick the right aisle the first time?
"risk having your ice cream sit on the outside step melting"
Well clearly you haven't used one of these services either, because they don't deliver frozen goods.
"It can't be much cheaper, as mo
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Overrated? How DARE I insult your favorite retailer?
I hope you get paid for this shit.
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This doesn't save you the time of shopping, as you still have to select what you want.
You've got to be kidding. Once I switched to online groceries, it takes me 15-25 minutes to do shopping for the next 10 days. Your shopping history is remembered, so it only takes longer the first time. I don't know where you live, but it'd take me 15-25 to get to and from a supermarket, never mind the time it actually takes to go through the place and then queue.
It's not convenient, as you have to select a delivery time that you know you'll be home, or risk having your ice cream sit on the outside step melting.
That's true, but I bet there's at least one 1-2h slot in any week you (or someone else) is there to pick it up.
It can't be much cheaper, as most grocery stores already run incredibly thin margins.
True. It's not cheaper.
So explain to me why anyone would intentionally get into this business? Who is your target audience?
Because it's
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So explain to me why anyone would intentionally get into this business?
Come to the UK and you will see that most of the major supermarkets offer this service.
A company called Ocado have been doing this since 2002 and dont have any physical stores, everything is picked from a central warehouse.
Tesco's largest stores will have around 4 or 5 vans that will deliver your order meaning your order wont come from a central warehouse but from a store that is closest to you. They even have a iPhone app that lets you scan the barcodes of the products you use to add to your basket.
Who is your target audience?
Everyo
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You must do your shopping at a 7-11, because when I was growing up, trips to the grocery store were usually weekly and the time between stepping out onto the driveway and coming back home and unloading the groceries into the kitchen was easily up to two hours all around. Not to mention writing down the shopping list, etc.
I have never gone grocery shopping in my adult life. For twelve years, I have used the delivery service available in my city (pretty much all the main grocery stores like Safeway, Albertson
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This doesn't save you the time of shopping, as you still have to select what you want.
There is a big difference between doing so by walking around the aisles with a shopping cart vs clicking on pictures on a website.
It's not convenient, as you have to select a delivery time that you know you'll be home, or risk having your ice cream sit on the outside step melting.
I'll just quote AmazonFresh FAQ:
What is Pre-Dawn delivery?
Pre-Dawn delivery is an early-morning delivery option. If you choose this option, we will leave your items on your doorstep early in the morning, prior to 6:00 AM, so they're there when you wake up. Your groceries will be kept fresh in temperature-controlled totes, so frozen items stay frozen and chilled items stay cold. O
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And the system will store your preferences, so you wont see what you are never going to order. Tesco are masters at targeted marketing.
That sounds really boring. Many of the best foods I make I've found by accident in a grocery store. Yes, I'm easily distracted in grocery stores. Short of toxic manufactured foods and those I'm allergic to, plus pickled eggs, lambs' tongues, and durians, I'm going to figure out how to eat most things.
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why? so we can subsidize the pension of some high school dropout box-monkey making 26$ an hour while I work my ass off?
fuck unions
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