Instacart (YC S12) aims to be the Amazon Prime of grocery delivery

He seemed to insist the reason WebVan couldn't be profitable was because fulfillment was too expensive, which served as inspiration for Kiva. Having people walk around was too slow and too big a cost center.

Obviously this is biased, but still an interesting point to throw in here, since it doesn't look like something they've addressed.

I absolutely loved Ocado when I was living in London. Tesco's was four blocks away, and Sainsbury's a kilometer. Getting groceries home on the bus is no fun.

Damaged goods were refunded no questions asked (the yogurt pots had a habit of bursting).

If I could get the same service in this area, I'd do it at the drop of a hat.

I'd pay $50/wk for someone to go to storage freezer (deer, beef), the butcher in Alameda (other meat), Berkeley Bowl (produce), Tokyo Fish Market (fish, japanese stuff), Whole Foods (365 is a decent deal, failthrough for anything not at the above), Costco (specific bulk items, like ito-en green tea and san pelligrino), and Trader Joe's (frozen food) to get groceries. Unfortunately, I think I outgrew Safeway some time ago. The other problem is I often want to buy highly seasonal items, based on availability, price, and quality. I don't think there's a good way to get the quality I want at a single store at a decent price; Whole Foods comes closest, but is expensive. Add BevMo for liquor, too.

Webvan had basically one or two steps better quality than Safeway (on par with Andronico's), and all in one place.

A service to get stuff for a party during the party (e.g. if you run out of beer) in 1h for $10 would be awesome. I don't think I'd use 3h Safeway delivery even if free. I would use a higher end service with great quality food (by going to the right shops) if the ordering experience exposed current inventory status.

For those who've not experienced Ocado weekly deliveries:

It's fantastic - they automatically create an order for us every week for delivery on Friday between 6pm and 7pm. The order includes items we've said to always include, excludes items we've said to never include, but other than that they create a "recommended" order based on our past shopping patterns. Usually it's a very close match and we just tweak some quantities if we've used less or more of something or want to wary our menu.

We then have until about 1am on Friday to amend the order via the web interface or their mobile apps as our needs change through the week. It cuts down my total grocery shopping time to about 5 minutes a week.

Everything comes sorted into color coded bags for the freezer, fridge or cupboards, and the invoice (and web site) lists the minimum number of days until the use by date of each item.

I hardly shop offline any more - between Ocado and Amazon, 99% of my shopping needs are taken care of.