131–140 of 170 posts
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Safeway in the US has home delivery from their own trucks.
The grocery stores I grew up going to in CO had delivery too, I think it was just primarily targeted at the elderly and disabled.
This is going to take a bit of magic to pull off. Groceries are very low margin items and people just opt for pre-made restaurant food when we are feeling lazy. When I'm motivated enough to prepare my own food I'm motivated enough to go to the grocery store. This is the domain of driver-less delivery vehicles of whatever kind.
It's common here (a poor part of the UK) for people to take a taxi home from the supermarket. So I can see it could work if all the supermarket's didn't already do delivery as they do here.
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Its interesting that in the UK, its more environmentally friendly to have your groceries delivered than to drive out and get them yourself because of the efficiency of the specialised delivery vans that have refrigerated racks for 100s of pallet\trays and then do a route in cities\suburbs serving dozens of orders in close proximity. Some random taxi driver sticking a pallet in their boot (sorry, trunk) seems like a p…
It seems like a reasonable way to experiment. The history of online grocery delivery in the US is littered with companies like Webvan that made huge infrastructure investments up-front on the "if you build it they will come" model. This seems like a really sensible way to find out if there is a market for almost zero investment.
Webvan is back. Try "http://www.webvan.com/". It's part of Amazon now. Webvan's operations head and some of his team went to Amazon. Amazon management observed that customers liked Webvan, and it would be a viable business if they could get the operating cost down. So the Webvan group was part of the effort to robotize Amazon's operations and build more local warehouses. Expansion is more cautious this time, but profitable.
I can't say I'd want my family's food traveling in a car used to haul the public around when it's not delivering food.
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We have a local place that does your grocery shopping for you but they charge a markup of 20-25%. That seems like a lot at first, but for $40 worth of groceries I'm only spending $10 to not have to drive to and from the store, and walk around for 30 minutes collecting items. Saves me an hour total or 45 minutes on the way home from work.
this is exactly why services like blue-apron and instacart are successful. Obviously they'll have growing pains, other humans will NEVER make the same decisions yourself might(shopping for yourself) but they're so incredibly convenient that other annoyances don't really matter.
UK supermarkets are a bit ahead of the curve here. All the large ones have a home delivery service, including Walmart-owned ASDA. It's quite cheap too: £1-6 if you buy £40, for various time slots. They all use their own vehicles and staff, so I suppose Wal-Mart can reduce the risk by using Uber/Lyft. I wonder though, does this mean no active cooling on the way? Can you trust that the ice cream is still frozen when it…
Safeway in the US has home delivery from their own trucks.
Two days ago, they delivered 1/3 of what they were meant to. So, they scheduled a re-delivery for the following day for the remaining items. Again, they forgot two of them.
UK supermarkets are a bit ahead of the curve here. All the large ones have a home delivery service, including Walmart-owned ASDA. It's quite cheap too: £1-6 if you buy £40, for various time slots. They all use their own vehicles and staff, so I suppose Wal-Mart can reduce the risk by using Uber/Lyft. I wonder though, does this mean no active cooling on the way? Can you trust that the ice cream is still frozen when it…
Population density in the UK is very different from the US.
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Population density in the UK is very different from the US.
Only if you assume they need to expand across Alaska or something. There are already several profitable grocery delivery company's out there, they just don't cover the entire US.
UK supermarkets are a bit ahead of the curve here. All the large ones have a home delivery service, including Walmart-owned ASDA. It's quite cheap too: £1-6 if you buy £40, for various time slots. They all use their own vehicles and staff, so I suppose Wal-Mart can reduce the risk by using Uber/Lyft. I wonder though, does this mean no active cooling on the way? Can you trust that the ice cream is still frozen when it…
The main psychological barrier is that it takes surprisingly long to choose groceries online, almost as long as walking around the store I think this is part of why I don't get food delivered; I'm quite close to the store and wandering round the aisles is a good prompt for buying things. Especially as I'm very special-offer-driven. I've been considering writing a random recipe generator/selector to help with this. "W…
UK supermarkets are a bit ahead of the curve here. All the large ones have a home delivery service, including Walmart-owned ASDA. It's quite cheap too: £1-6 if you buy £40, for various time slots. They all use their own vehicles and staff, so I suppose Wal-Mart can reduce the risk by using Uber/Lyft. I wonder though, does this mean no active cooling on the way? Can you trust that the ice cream is still frozen when it…
The main psychological barrier is that it takes surprisingly long to choose groceries online, almost as long as walking around the store I think this is part of why I don't get food delivered; I'm quite close to the store and wandering round the aisles is a good prompt for buying things. Especially as I'm very special-offer-driven. I've been considering writing a random recipe generator/selector to help with this. "W…