91–100 of 106 posts
I love that the website doesn't shoehorn me into a crappy mobile version when I load it, but what happens now is that I get a picture of an iPhone and apparently nothing else—it's not at all intuitive for me to think to scroll horizontally to find the content of the web page, especially with the hidden-by-default scroll bars on the iPhone. To clarify, the horizontal scroll bar that appeared when scrolling vertically…
I'd love to have this service at home, so I'm (selfishly) hoping Instacart becomes hugely successful! That said, I can't help but wonder whether the company will find a business model with sustainable economics. A lot of really smart people have tried and failed to accomplish this sort of thing before. For example, Amazon invested $60 million in Kozmo.com back in the late 90's, and they couldn't make it work. (Kozmo.…
While I agree that a lot of smart people have tried this before (Kozmo.com, WebVan, etc), I believe that there are significant differences in the approach that we are taking. Specifically, Kozmo.com was founded in an era where you could IPO without having profits. Having that mentality from day one allowed them to make huge concessions to users such as give them free delivery on everything, and not have a minimum ord…
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While I agree that a lot of smart people have tried this before (Kozmo.com, WebVan, etc), I believe that there are significant differences in the approach that we are taking. Specifically, Kozmo.com was founded in an era where you could IPO without having profits. Having that mentality from day one allowed them to make huge concessions to users such as give them free delivery on everything, and not have a minimum ord…
apoorvamehta: thank you for your prompt, articulate response. The logistical challenges look daunting to me. My recollection is that the problem of coordinating and optimizing deliveries in such a point-to-point system with time constraints is NP-hard (I could be wrong about this, but that's my recollection). Then one has to deal with all sorts of real-world problems like order-fulfillment errors and substitutions (i…
Good luck
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And customers will, what, walk out to the robovan and dig through the boxes until they find theirs? Paying a guy to sit in the robovan and run the packages to the door isn't going to be appreciably cheaper just because he sits in the passenger seat.
Robotically offering me a box seems significantly easier than robotically driving a freaking van.
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The expense is mainly because of the driver. The moment self driving vans become economically feasible the delivery expenses will drop precipitously.
Are you just waiving fuel costs?
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apoorvamehta: thank you for your prompt, articulate response. The logistical challenges look daunting to me. My recollection is that the problem of coordinating and optimizing deliveries in such a point-to-point system with time constraints is NP-hard (I could be wrong about this, but that's my recollection). Then one has to deal with all sorts of real-world problems like order-fulfillment errors and substitutions (i…
cs702, your recollection is correct. Last mile logistics is a hard problem. Not to mention, order-fulfillment errors and substitutions do happen. However, we believe these are solvable. It comes down to two things - one is proper training of the drivers and using technology as much as possible to eliminate chances of errors. That is too high level. Let me explain more clearly for one specific case of order substituti…
What will you do if all your drivers are busy? Will I be able to book an order for an hour-long slot in the future, or is delivery now or never?