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Earlier quoted context omitted.
When I lived in New York 5 years ago, every grocery store I went to had some sort of delivery option.
Can you order through their website, app, etc? I'm not going to call in a weeks grocery shopping over the phone.
Even a lot of bodegas have their own little websites for ordering.
First of all, pretty much every single time, I was missing items!
Secondly, navigating the online store is a horrible experience. Finding things, thinking of what you need. The whole thing stinks.
The experience of walking down an isle and picking out what you need, is strangely more efficient.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Heh yeah, it's a bit of a contradictory term, but it's the only 'generic' way to describe it that I know of. Most of them are branded with the store's name with a suffix like 'local', 'express' or 'metro'
The US doesn't really have that class of store for some reason. Even in urban areas, there tend to be either full-fledged grocery stores or "convenience stores" like 7-11 which have minimal fresh food. There are certainly exceptions but they tend to be local one-off markets. AFAIK, there aren't any widespread versions of the express/metro markets like you see in the UK.
* Convenience Store
* Dollar store (a little more food options at places like Dollar General/Tree/Family Dollar, usually with a small refrigerator section and eggs and milk and juice)
* "Mini" grocery stores, like Piggly Wiggly Express or Dollar General Market
* Stores with mostly food and limited selection like Aldi
* Supermarkets like Kroger and Publix
* Supercenters like Super Walmart and Super Target with full supermarket selection and lots of other stuff
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 first time I tried Amazon Fresh the mailman showed up in the morning before his route with my groceries rolling around in the back of the mail truck. I unloaded them myself, and also had to give back the re-usable bags before he left.
I'm always surprised grocery delivery is still a big deal in the US. All the major supermarkets in the UK do home delivery, next day, for a £3-5 delivery fee. You can go the site, fill your basket, and checkout. You also get a 1-2 hour delivery slot so you don't have to wait at home all day. We also have Amazon Prime Now doing grocery delivery within 1 hour in some cities. I can see how it would be a problem in some…
A fair amount of US grocery stores do as well. Our local grocery store has a pick up option as well as a delivery. Another a few miles down the road near a restaurant we enjoy also has a (free) place for us to charge our car why we shop. I am hesitant to adopt them. I guess we are finicky about how we shop. Fearful of the bad head of lettuce or banana or what have you. Or how will we know they didn't chose the yogurt…
There are ways around this though. Using Ocado in the UK, they will specify minimum lifetimes for all of the products you order and display them prominently (for example, in the iPhone app: https://www.dropbox.com/s/3d0awqydeqq386v/2016-06-03%2019.58...)
I'm pretty sure they'll also refund anything you aren't happy with, which helps to keep quality high.
Even over 15-20 years back, my mom used to get door delivery of the month's groceries by just making a phone call. One of the reason's for the success of this model was that most customers did not have a car to transport all of their groceries and phone-order was the easiest option available to them. (I'm talking about the late 90s when Internet was not that common).
Of course, it works on the assumption that the customer exactly knows what they want - rather than making them buying arbitrary items at the store.
Most of the merchants circulate their menu/deals along with newspapers and have a phone number that customers can reach them at. All you do is decide on what you want to order and then call the merchant at the given number. They deliver all the items at your house within a couple of hours. It uses the idea of "Cash on Delivery" i.e., you make your payment in-person to the delivery person. This method has been in practice for so many years that customers are quite used to the entire process and the merchants make sure that the delivery is processed as comfortably as possible.
I'm always surprised grocery delivery is still a big deal in the US. All the major supermarkets in the UK do home delivery, next day, for a £3-5 delivery fee. You can go the site, fill your basket, and checkout. You also get a 1-2 hour delivery slot so you don't have to wait at home all day. We also have Amazon Prime Now doing grocery delivery within 1 hour in some cities. I can see how it would be a problem in some…
A fair amount of US grocery stores do as well. Our local grocery store has a pick up option as well as a delivery. Another a few miles down the road near a restaurant we enjoy also has a (free) place for us to charge our car why we shop. I am hesitant to adopt them. I guess we are finicky about how we shop. Fearful of the bad head of lettuce or banana or what have you. Or how will we know they didn't chose the yogurt…
In the UK you simply tell the delivery driver that you're not happy with the item and he marks it for refund. Generally they hand the item back as well, no point carrying it back to the store to be dumped.
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…
American supermarkets have numerous options for delivery, many of them provided by the same brand, but only Instacart has come close to delivering an experience I can endorse. Their employees are professional and have been taught to provide an easy, pleasant delivery experience. The first time I tried Amazon Fresh the mailman showed up in the morning before his route with my groceries rolling around in the back of th…
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…
Regarding your comment on choosing groceries online:
My wife is a huge fan of Walmart-To-Go (order online, pull up to a designated station in a parking lot at your convenience, and they bring them out and load them into your vehicle), and now gets the shopping done in minutes, because after you first few orders, the app does a very good job of letting your past orders inform new ones.
It seems like Uber and Lyft are currently doing deals like this as big special one-offs. At what point do real world services like this become plug and play via APIs?
(Disclosure: I work on the Uber API team.)
