Introducing Amazon Fresh

Yeah, when I lived in the UK I often used major chain's delivery services (Tesco, Sainsburys, Ocado, etc) when I couldn't get to a store. Safeway has a pretty good delivery service in the US for next day grocery deliveries (pretty much as good as in the UK - apart from the website, which is pretty terrible).

Though, one of the perks of living in the Bay Area is Instacart. Instacart is 100x better than the UK delivery services since they offer same day delivery that generally arrives within 2 hours (and then there's Postmates if you need things within 1 hour). They also have a subscription model like Amazon Prime Fresh where if you pay $99 a year you get free delivery for orders over $35 which is super useful.

I think you're making a lot of assumptions about who their target demographic is. Maybe it's not the guy who has time to run to the store in the afternoon, but the mom I know using Amazon Prime because taking two kids to the store is a huge time-consuming pain. My company also used AmPrime to order snacks rather than using our exclusively skilled staff to run errands.

It might not be right for everyone, but for those who have lots of money and little time it's a great service.

This would be more attractive if Amazon Fresh weren't completely unreliable--it's often out of stock of the products I want. I must throw my recipie plan in the trash on a regular basis. Whole Foods or PCC it is most definitely not.

I used the free trial in LA for a while. I placed quite a few orders in the two months that I used it, but ultimately decided to cancel it before I had to pay the additional $220.

The selection was somewhat mediocre compared to what you would find in a real grocery store. The quality of produce was good, while the quality of the meat was mediocre. The selection of wine and beer was abysmal (wine and beer were made available through a third party, but they seemed to have a very limited selection). The pricing was also considerably higher than what you would find at a supermarket and just slightly lower than Whole Foods (while the quality was not nearly as good...). They seemed unable to meet the demand for certain items (La Brea bakery bread for example), and in two separate orders they just didn't send some items.

I realized with the first order that you really need to do the in person delivery since you'll be stuck with a bunch of giant box/bag things full of frozen water bottles cluttering up your residence unless you return them to the delivery person. They encourage you to tip the delivery person as well, which I find annoying. If I'm already paying $220 for this additional service, why don't Amazon pay them a decent wage? In the end, I just don't order enough groceries to justify the $220 a year it costs.

Yes, and I think $299 price tag would be more compelling if products had better pricing.

I do my shopping at Shop Rite and A&P, and I find Amazon's price 20-50% more expensive on most of the items I buy.

It may be because I create shopping list around what's on sale, but I'm by no means a crazy couple clipper. I assume other people do the same.

My $500/month grocery bill can easily turn into $700/month, which adds up to $2000+ in added cost per year.

If Amazon offered lowered product price, coupon-sales, and charge reasonable service fee rather than annual fee, I would use this service, because grocery shopping isn't exactly fun for me.

It seems like most of the grocery delivery services fail, because they're too aggressive with product markups to make up for 'free' shipping.