Webvan tried to do it right 20 years go, with local fulfillment centers and automation, but they had 3% market share in 30 cities, instead of 30% market share in 3 cities. Cost per order was too high. The Webvan execs went on to Kiva Robotics and Amazon Fresh, and Amazon will probably try this again. They have the market penetration.
Americans, it turns out, would rather visit a store than buy food online
91–100 of 488 posts
Re: Americans, it turns out, would rather visit a store than buy food online
#92Re: Americans, it turns out, would rather visit a store than buy food online
#93Earlier quoted context omitted.
That's a great marketing gimmick that some companies have made, but it's largely false. https://www.vox.com/the-goods/2019/2/26/18240399/food-waste-...
> But when a crop is complete, farmers plow everything back into the soil. Some of it ends up as organic matter that is supporting soil health, and that is okay, too. Basically declaring that the waste is not waste. Solving problems by changing definitions.
Re: Americans, it turns out, would rather visit a store than buy food online
#94It's not that I want to visit the store it's that I can't trust the store people to properly pick out fresh produce or good meat. When the stock person just takes a bucket of apples and dumps them in without care so most of them are bruised, why would I want that same person selecting which apples to send me? Often times to find 3 apples I have to examine 10+. Most of the produce selection is this way. Meat selection…
This brings up another question in my mind. You are examining 10 apples, well, so is everyone else. So all that fresh fruit has been held, bare handed, by the person who picked it, the person who loaded it and x number of customers who've examined it. Not that ordering fruit online eliminates that problem but it seems like it would be a little more hygienic. One picker, one loader/examiner. Maybe we need a better way…
I'm not sure how the examination can be done at a later time than picking. Either you want to pick it or you don't. And different people have different standards.
The picker should just always choose the best available. Running low on selection is what naturally forces suboptimal picks.
Re: Americans, it turns out, would rather visit a store than buy food online
#95Earlier quoted context omitted.
That's a great marketing gimmick that some companies have made, but it's largely false. https://www.vox.com/the-goods/2019/2/26/18240399/food-waste-...
> But when a crop is complete, farmers plow everything back into the soil. Some of it ends up as organic matter that is supporting soil health, and that is okay, too. Basically declaring that the waste is not waste. Solving problems by changing definitions.
Re: Americans, it turns out, would rather visit a store than buy food online
#96Earlier quoted context omitted.
Playing devil's advocate: an enormous amount of food waste is caused by people simply refusing to buy ugly food. It's literally less wasteful to shave off most of a carrot so that it's a baby carrot, than to try to sell the same carrots as-is. There's nothing wrong with the ugly carrots--but they'll rot on the shelves. Bruised apples are perfectly edible. Maybe you just don't like them, and that's fine--there's no ac…
You don't get any discount in this case though. You're still paying $2-3/lb for bruised apples that are like you said literally waste at that point and $2-5/lb for chicken that if you picked out yourself would be of higher quality. Even if they did give you a price break for lower quality food. They'd still do things like give you a pineapple that will never ripen before it rots like we received last week.
Think of it this way, you have fruit at home to be shared by all the members of your family, it was fine when you bought it, but now some of it is bruised. So now you own a mix of fruit: what do you do, throw away the bruised fruit, or trim it, or give a loved one the good looking one and eat the bruised one yourself? Those costs (tossing or trimming or eating slightly lower quality) have to be borne by somebody, in this case the whole family or a member of the family.
You buy a car and you buy insurance for it; that's because a car is expensive and you don't want to bear the burden of a bruised car yourself, you want to share that burden with all the other people who buy insurance; and yet, the insurance company is making money, so apparently you are paying a little extra for this decrease in the variance of quality.
Same with your theory of purchasing fruit: you are not saying (in your original comment) what you think you are saying, that bruised fruit is too expensive; what you are actually saying is that you prefer to overpay for expensive fruit all the time and not deal with imperfections. Because otherwise, if the supermarket could sell all their fruit and not just perfect fruit, and was competing against other supermarkets, then the fruit would be overall actually cheaper across the board; you say "you don't get any discount", but with time you actually would.
I explain all this because it allows you to live your life feeling less miffed.
Re: Americans, it turns out, would rather visit a store than buy food online
#97It's not that I want to visit the store it's that I can't trust the store people to properly pick out fresh produce or good meat. When the stock person just takes a bucket of apples and dumps them in without care so most of them are bruised, why would I want that same person selecting which apples to send me? Often times to find 3 apples I have to examine 10+. Most of the produce selection is this way. Meat selection…
You also can't substitute one brand of salsa for another. That'll start fights in some circles.
Ice cream flavors: my favorite for something I'd never pick (still ate it, annoyed)
Margarine instead of butter -- the heck? Won't use it.
Vanilla yogurt in place of plain yogurt. Slowly eating it for breakfast, annoyed; can't use it in savory dishes which is what it's for.
Juices: I can't stand sugar alcohols, and got a ton of crap full of sucralose. Won't touch the stuff...
Not to mention the half-rotten veggies that I'd never select for myself / won't survive a few days in the fridge.
Re: Americans, it turns out, would rather visit a store than buy food online
#98Earlier quoted context omitted.
That's a great marketing gimmick that some companies have made, but it's largely false. https://www.vox.com/the-goods/2019/2/26/18240399/food-waste-...
I am highly skeptical. The author of that article makes a lot of claims, but doesn't really go into a lot of how the information was obtained. I'm not denying there's some marketing involved here--I'm sure there is. But there's also some element of truth here. I've worked at a food co-op and they definitely composted a lot of food. In the article's logic, that's not food waste, but I think that feeding people is stil…
You realize that crops have to have organic material to grow, right? Using leftovers, spoilage, and damaged produce from the previous crop is how agriculture is traditionally done. If farmers don't use composting, then they have to buy some other source of organic material and fertilizer to grow the next year's crops. You say "feeding people is better", but there's more than enough food for everyone. The answer to hunger is not to force farmers to give the leftover produce to poor folks. Rather, it's to give the poor folks the means with which to buy the food they need. There's plenty to be bought! So much that lots of it gets thrown out! It'd be much healthier for the entire system if we addressed the problem at the source and made use of the systems that are in place rather than trying to short-circuit things, resulting in a lot of unintended side-effects.
Re: Americans, it turns out, would rather visit a store than buy food online
#99This issue is compounded by the delivery service I'm using refusing to handle "replacement items" requests — if 'garlic' is out and they offer 'garlic salt', you can't request 'twice as many shallots' or 'garlic powder', because their worker doesn't have the freedom to make judgment calls and doesn't get paid enough to have time for that conversation and can't make substitutions that add any new items to the list.
I am being significantly undercharged for delivery groceries and I am getting significantly poor service, and so I will stop using delivery groceries as soon as the pandemic winds down in my area. In the past I used third-party delivery services (e.g. Instacart) and they were much better equipped to make sensible decisions — but the cost-benefit tradeoff of paying them an appropriate wage is such that I prefer to shop in person rather than pay an hour's wages to someone else.
Missing from the equation is the time taken navigating terrible online sites. Search for "eggs" and you get easter candy. Search for "salt" and you get one billion kinds of salt, ordered haphazardly. It's impossible to navigate "the fruit isle" because they present everything in a grid of tiny icons. Investing the time necessary to build a visually-attractive site would make this more plausible, but would require significant levels of effort in UI and product photos that exceed the bare minimum exerted by machine-driven listings.
So, charge me too little and the service is so poor I loathe it; charge me the correct amount and the service still comes at a net loss in time-and-money, because the UI consumes the hour of my life that I could have just driven to the store and shopped with instead, and then I pay a fee for having my time wasted on top of that. I imagine this makes more sense for others who have more complicated lives and need to be able to prepare an order during store-closed hours, but it doesn't make much sense for me.
Re: Americans, it turns out, would rather visit a store than buy food online
#100Earlier quoted context omitted.
Playing devil's advocate: an enormous amount of food waste is caused by people simply refusing to buy ugly food. It's literally less wasteful to shave off most of a carrot so that it's a baby carrot, than to try to sell the same carrots as-is. There's nothing wrong with the ugly carrots--but they'll rot on the shelves. Bruised apples are perfectly edible. Maybe you just don't like them, and that's fine--there's no ac…
You don't get any discount in this case though. You're still paying $2-3/lb for bruised apples that are like you said literally waste at that point and $2-5/lb for chicken that if you picked out yourself would be of higher quality. Even if they did give you a price break for lower quality food. They'd still do things like give you a pineapple that will never ripen before it rots like we received last week.