
US online grocery sales hit record $7.2B in June - prostoalex
https://techcrunch.com/2020/07/06/u-s-online-grocery-shopping-hits-record-7-2-billion-in-june/
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grawprog
This probably isn't going to fly here but...I don't like online grocery
shopping and hope that it never fully replaces grocery stores. I appreciate
the increase in options for people who do want it, but it should never become
the only option.

Things like fresh produce, dairy and meat I need to choose myself. Looking at
pictures of these things on a website is not even close to the same thing.
Each individual one of those things is different. They vary in quality and
weight and to be honest, I don't really trust a grocery store clerk to examine
these things for me.

Grocery delivery just creates yet another disconnect between us and where our
food comes from. Grocery stores themselves are already fairly far removed from
our food sources, but at least there we have the option to still examine our
food and choose it before purchase

Food's become far too impersonal and inhuman as it is. It's one of the most
important things for us(and a large majority of life out there). It should be
respected and people should never forget where their food comes from.

The way we treat food production in general in modern times is pretty
appalling as is. Continuing to remove people further from their food is a step
in the wrong direction and just promotes yet more mass consolidation of
production of food.

Eventually, it's going to cut out a ton of businesses in between, small food
producers will suffer and large conglomerates selling bland homogenized crap
will take over and globally supply the population with their mass produced
delivered food.

~~~
nwienert
A local butcher started doing delivery where I live and they deliver
incredibly high quality meat. It’s been a revelation.

I combine that with two other sources for delivery: Costco via Instacart,
which gets you all the bulk needs and some produce, basically you never have
to worry about quality.

And then Amazon Fresh for cheap staples and pantry items. We have a really
high quality vegetarian market too that delivers on Instacart.

If you do it wrong, you essentially will have a bad time. Amazon has horrible
meat and not great produce, but Costco and the local butcher have amazing
stuff.

I used to hate shopping for groceries online, but in all honesty it’s gotten
quite good if you live in the right area and figure out good places to look.
I’ve changed my mind.

~~~
grawprog
I dunno, I guess I just think of things differently, when I move, the first
thing I do is look for the local butchers, delis or produce shops, they've
almost always got the best quality for price outside of farm fresh stuff. Bulk
stuff is always a planned trip to scrounge all the best bulk sections around.
Wandering into random food stores you find on your travels and discovering
little stores selling spices or vegetables you've never seen before. Fighting
with little old ladies over the best cheese in the Italian deli.

I enjoy that stuff. Food brings me joy. Finding and choosing the best
ingredients for the stuff I make has always been something i've enjoyed. Well,
once I learned to cook well enough that I came to appreciate it.

These things that come as revelations were always available to you. I may be
being presumptuous to you and the other commenters, but it seems to be more
that the change in routine and living situations has caused a lot of people to
reassess their food in general.

These things are great and positive. I may just be overly pessimistic, but I
worry for that everyone like you and the others, there's ten others who never
think about it and continue on as is, in a more convenient and ever
disconnected way.

I feel like there's a good way and bad way this could all play out. I guess
I'm just most worried that rather than small local businesses getting their
stuff out there, they'll get drowned out by the big players that are going to
start dropping into this market hard. It could go either way. I just really
don't want to see it got the big corporate route yet again.

Like you and others say, this is an opportunity for small local businesses to
get out their and I have seen it first hand. At my current job I share space
with a new small local organic produce delivery company and those are the
kinds of people I'd like to see do well from this.

~~~
nwienert
Hey, a chacun sa vérité.

I do miss the Italian deli that closed. It’s not that we don’t frequent the
corner markets and farmers markets either! And again, the delivery we get is a
small local butcher, and I imagine once things open up we’ll visit when we
have time.

I think of online as replacing just the droll half, or when times in a pinch.
The pantry items, milk. It saves time for trips to my favorite deli. No more
DFW-commencement-speech Safeway coupon rush hour traffic jams. More time for
the farmers market!

You sound like a nostalgic grandpa pining for the good old days that are
passing, but to be honest, if anything the online half has opened up a lot of
room for fun excursions in the real world. I share the hope that local
businesses thrive as well. The Asian fish market ladies certainly know me
better than before. One not need replace the other, but the optionality has
made things dramatically better for me, at least.

~~~
grawprog
>You sound like a nostalgic grandpa pining for the good old days that are
passing

I'm really glad I'm not actually a nostalgic grandpa at 30...I feel like i
would probably have made some pretty poor life choices along the way.

------
compumike
If you're in the Bay Area and have a car, I'd recommend checking out Cheetah
[1]. It's a startup that pivoted [2] from doing restaurant wholesale
deliveries (from Restaurant Depot, which only sells to restaurants!) to doing
drive-through pickup for consumers. You place an order by app, drive up to one
of their parked refrigerated trucks at the scheduled time, and say your name.
They load your trunk, and you're done. It's taken the majority of my grocery
spend in the past few months and I hope the concept remains post-pandemic.

By doing pickup, you get pretty good convenience (almost as good as delivery),
great pricing, and somewhat limited selection (but always reflected in-app at
order time, rather than surprising you at pickup time). That's a tradeoff that
works for me.

A few months ago you could only order restaurant-sized quantities of things
(like minimum 25 lbs of bananas), but they've since started making more items
available in "family friendly" sizes (3 lbs bananas, $1.80).

(They do have a $20-off your first order referral promotion I'll mention [3]
in case you want to try it, but I'm just a happy customer who wants to see the
concept take off.)

[1] [https://www.gocheetah.com/](https://www.gocheetah.com/)

[2] [https://techcrunch.com/2020/04/28/cheetah-a-restaurant-
whole...](https://techcrunch.com/2020/04/28/cheetah-a-restaurant-wholesale-
app-that-pivoted-to-consumers-for-covid-19-nabs-36m/)

[3] Enter referral code "2EA2666F" at sign-up or
[https://cheetah.onelink.me/j187/7b49398d](https://cheetah.onelink.me/j187/7b49398d)

~~~
scarface74
Aren’t many local grocery stores doing curbside pickup? Locally Walmart and
Kroger is.

~~~
skybrian
I tried Safeway and it would have been faster to do the shopping myself rather
than wait in the car, so it's not something you do just for convenience.

~~~
jpindar
At Walmart they bring your order out within five minutes of your arrival.

~~~
bluGill
Sometimes I've waited half an hour and then gave up cause the kids needed to
get to bed. Nobody else got their order either.

Only happened once, but still they have work to do.

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axaxs
Grocery shopping was one of my guilty pleasures. Gets me out of the house,
walking around, thinking of combinations to cook, etc. Since March, I've been
100% Instacart, and notice them all over my neighborhood each day, so
certainly I see the mentioned explosion.

That said, I miss shopping and to be honest, Instacart is both expensive and
unreliable. I'll go back to in store once things die down, and I'm sure many
others will too. Meaning, I think this is more of a spike than a long term
trend.

~~~
lucaslee
The curbside pickup at Walmart is surprisingly good. You pay the same price as
in-store shopping and the grocery selection is very good. Instacart is just
too expensive. I like honest pricing.

~~~
tim58
Walmart really fails at providing quality food that isn't highly processed. I
find much better quality, and often better prices on the grains and legumes
that make up the bulk of my caloric needs, and their selection of organic
produce is very lacking.

While I'm happy people have affordable, convenient, and socially distanced
access to food, most of what is in the Walmart grocery section are things I
wouldn't personally consider food.

~~~
JMTQp8lwXL
Whole foods can't be faked. An apple is an apple. A whole chicken is a whole
chicken. There are different farming techniques, pesticides etc but the less
processing there is, the less opportunity for quality slippage as well. And
it's up to the consumer to fill their cart with highly-processed or minimally-
processed items. And like any other grocer, Walmart offers the same spectrum
of options.

~~~
shard
As I recall, Walmart fills their meat with water, increasing the weight and
decreasing their costs.

Found it. "Wal-Mart, for example, says a majority of its fresh offerings are
enhanced with a 6 to 12 percent solution of water, salt, sodium phosphate and
natural flavorings."

~~~
dragonwriter
That's very common, not unique to WalMart.

~~~
every
Salt water is definitely cheaper than meat...

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nawgszy
This article feels a bit "no shit", but there are a few interesting numbers in
the table there.

* August 2019, 16.1million monthly users, 1.2billion revenue

* March 2020, 39.5million monthly users, 4billion revenue

* June 2020, 45.6million monthly, 7.2billion revenue

Not sure how best to format on here, but this is apparently a high growth
thing both before and during covid.

~~~
majormajor
The March vs August numbers aren't very meaningful to me without
January/February. March was definitely in the thick of it, stay-at-home wise.

~~~
nawgszy
I agreed with you at first, but I recall the Bay Area having one of the
earliest shutdowns in the US, and that started March 17. While some companies
were definitely sounding the WFH alarm about a week prior to that, I think the
March -> April jump would've been more incongruent with April -> May jump
unless COVID wasn't the only driving factor behind the August -> March growth
in the first place.

~~~
majormajor
Anecdotally, I saw a lot more people ordering online in the last two weeks in
March than in late April and on. (And, based on the empty shelves then,
probably an equivalent increase in in-person stocking up, too.) Remember that
stores were running out of stuff before official shutdowns happened, too.

I'm curious what week by week data would look like.

~~~
nawgszy
Fair enough, that's a good counterpoint, and I do agree seeing all the data
from the source without our limited bucketing would be very interesting.

------
crazygringo
I've got to say, that while FreshDirect has always been way more expensive
than my local grocery store, Amazon Fresh has always been way cheaper. _Waaay_
cheaper.

I live in New York City, and I manage to save about 40% on my grocery bill
using Amazon Fresh. Whether it's crackers, nuts, chocolate, sausage, ice
cream, whatever -- everything that's not extremely perishable is somewhere
between 30% and 50% cheaper on Amazon. (I buy everything except fresh veggies,
meat, dairy, eggs and bread on Amazon now.)

I like the experience of shopping at my local store. But when I see that
spending $90 there turns into spending $55 at Amazon... it's pretty much a no-
brainer. And I spend a half-hour walking at a park instead of walking around
the aisles of a grocery store and waiting in line for ten minutes.

~~~
SamuelAdams
Just curious, does that 40% decrease include shipping costs? Or do you use
Amazon Prime? I have often found that Amazon's initial prices are cheaper, but
if you pay for shipping it comes out to about the same, sometimes more, than a
local grocery store. I live in Michigan so that may be different than NYC.

~~~
crazygringo
Yeah I have Prime so Fresh shipping is free. I don't think I'd consider Fresh
as an option at all without it. (But I already consider Prime to be worth it
just for my regular Amazon purchases, so I don't really even factor it into
the Fresh price.)

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gdubs
Instacart has a really smart tactic in showing you how many hours you’ve saved
shopping.

Ordinarily I love grocery shopping but after having done online for several
months now, I’m not sure I’ll go back. I imagine I’ll order the bulk of the
items online, and visit the specialty / small grocers to pick out the odds and
ends that are special.

Farm boxes are great too, for organic produce (and growing a garden!).

~~~
odysseus
Wonder how they calculate this with any accuracy. They can't see the time you
spend comparison shopping on other online sites to see if you're getting a
good deal. (which you usually aren't - Target and Costco, for example, often
dramatically raise their online prices vs. their in-store prices)

Agree on the farm boxes - had one of those and we were overloaded with
produce. Bit expensive but once you taste fresh carrots it's hard to go back
to store bought.

------
ponker
Lot of people here complaining that grocery delivery sucks because the
shoppers pick bad produce.

 _That 's because the current business models treat grocery shopping as
unskilled labor._

I certainly don't think that picking a good peach or watermelon is an
unskilled job. In fact any time my wife gets complex produce like that it
sucks and I have stopped asking her to buy any produce. Spending an hour to go
and pick some high quality food is a skill that, if you want it done right,
will cost you some money.

This is possible to do as even fancy restaurants have employees who they trust
to obtain the correct produce that they need. All it needs is a consistent
shopper on a week-to-week basis (so they can learn what you want) and the
willingness of the customer to pay appropriately.

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InfiniteRand
For me the hassle of scheduling the online order really took the shine off of
online grocery shopping. Expense was also a factor, but if I need to stay up
till 2 AM to schedule an order, I would rather just stock up more in fewer
grocery trips and try to go for odd hours

~~~
eyeball
Why are you having to stay up until 2 am?

I've had no problem filling my cart and getting a delivery time any time I
want. There were some "delivery windows are full" problems early in the
pandemic, but no problems now.

Most sites I use make it easy to re-order past purchases so I can get my
shopping done in 5 minutes most weeks.

~~~
chapium
Jewel/ Safeway/ Albertsons online ordering systems are abysmal. Very high
friction to browse, endless searching, and when you get to the end you find
out that the items you selected are not in inventory for that store. The
switch sizes and brands like there was no consideration for price or storage
preference.

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cameronh90
These numbers seem very high - even before Covid.

Does anyone know the rough market share of that US$7.2bn in June? Is Instacart
really scaling that high, with their inefficient personal shopper approach, or
is Walmart really killing it?

Additionally, to compare internationally, the UK reportedly spent US$15bn in
the entire of 2018 compared to the US' ~$24bn. But the UK online grocery
market is much more established - every major supermarket (except Lidl/Aldi)
has direct warehouse to customer deliveries by van, in addition to Prime Now,
Amazon Fresh, Ocado and others.

I'm struggling to reconcile the difference even accounting for the 5x
population difference. Lived experience suggests that online grocery shopping
throughout the UK is very prevalent but (perhaps until recently) was fairly
atypical in most of the US. Possible explanations are the value of orders is
greater in the US, or online grocery deliveries has a wider classification?
Personally I don't use online grocery shopping in London most of the time as I
live next to a supermarket. Is that perhaps more common than I realise?

~~~
tialaramex
> every major supermarket (except Lidl/Aldi) has direct warehouse to customer
> deliveries by van

While obviously an Ocado order comes from a warehouse built for this purpose
all the high street supermarkets near me are delivering from their existing
stores. The Sainsbury's I use at the moment because it's right down the road
and huge (so I can shop every eight days to get everything with only one
exposure) has a fleet of delivery vans based there.

Some also have "dark" stores that don't serve any walk-in customers but my
impression is that they aren't cloning Ocado, even Waitrose (whose produce is
sold by Ocado) would sell me stuff from the Waitrose near me, not a warehouse.

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mc32
Well, you gotta get your good one way or another. If the restaurants are
closed, you have to make your own.

Wonder if this will last long enough for some people to decide they like home
cooking more than taking out... (maybe they bought additional kitchen
appliances, etc)

On the other hand once people have to return to the office they will have less
discretionary time for cooking...

~~~
cm2187
I bought a draft beer machine. Best investment ever!

~~~
koolba
Details?!

~~~
cm2187
Perfectdraft. I picked it because you can buy some German Munich beer (though
the kegs are all out of stock right now!).

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treelovinhippie
Interesting cultural difference with Australia (25 million people) where
online grocery sales are ~USD$4B:
[https://www.ibisworld.com/au/industry/online-grocery-
sales/5...](https://www.ibisworld.com/au/industry/online-grocery-sales/5527/)

~~~
dmurray
There's not much difference. Those are yearly numbers. Australians are
spending about half as much per person per year as Americans, but the
Australian number seems to be at least partly pre-coronavirus.

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amiga_500
Covid killed restaurants, a local fresh produce supplier switched from
restaurants to the public. The fruit and veg is great quality. I would order
online from them forever, but I suspect in time they will switch back to
restaurants and I will be left with poor quality supermarket fare.

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dhosek
I bet the people behind Peapod regret shutting down their Midwest business in
February. [https://www.chicagotribune.com/business/ct-biz-peapod-
closin...](https://www.chicagotribune.com/business/ct-biz-peapod-closing-in-
midwest-20200211-5eqsre53cfaavgbhboiq4ulshy-story.html)

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olah_1
Are there any online grocery delivery services that accept crypto currency
like BTC or ETH?

------
Simulacra
For those who don’t want to have to wear a mask to the grocery store this
might be the option for them.

~~~
_bxg1
Even with a mask you're putting yourself at some risk. This is the safest
option for anyone who can afford it.

~~~
givehimagun
Some of my friends who use the delivery service are immune-compromised. Feels
like a win/win for them even if it costs more.

~~~
skellera
I’ve been thinking about prices that make this worth it. Amazon Fresh is free
delivery over a certain amount with Prime. I’m sure I’m paying a bit more per
item but it can’t be more than the time I’m saving by not browsing and
avoiding impulse buys.

It seems like a win-win for me. Does anyone have a counter to that?

~~~
IfOnlyYouKnew
Some people enjoy grocery shopping. Some consider it low-key exercise (for
office workers that do not engage in any actual sports, it's often the 2nd
most strenuous regular activity, just after sex).

It's also furthering the trend towards isolation, the segregation into
precarious low-wage service jobs vs a feudal class mostly busy with co-
ordinating this personal army of theirs. The latter can afford this because
they have institutionalised power structures that have kept lower incomes flat
for half a century while the tax structure was turned on its head, with the
highest incomes now paying lower rates than day labourers.

One would assume that high-paying jobs somehow correlate with value
generation. But when shit hit the fan, they were the first to be sent home for
half a year and economists are still trying to find anyone who actually
noticed that regional key-account managers were mostly just busy with creating
funny zoom backgrounds.

Online sales obviously kill brick-and-mortar retail, which leads to whatever
the opposite of a liveable city is.

Large companies tend to run more efficiently. Or, more accurately, they are
wasteful in ways that do not have the side benefits of, say, a single-
proprietor sponsoring some small-town event because that's "how it's done", or
continuing to employ someone even when it's a bad business decision, because
they have worked with them for a decade and feel a sense of responsibility.

They also heavily favour concentration of market share with just one or very
few companies, who are more powerful in relation to customers, employees, and
the state. While gains in efficiencies have so far dominated, the
beneficiaries of this shift in power will at some point try to cash it in.

Other than that, it's pretty cool.

~~~
perl4ever
>But when shit hit the fan, they were the first to be sent home for half a
year and economists are still trying to find anyone who actually noticed that
regional key-account managers were mostly just busy with creating funny zoom
backgrounds.

I don't get it. You think people were useless because when they went home, it
didn't affect the economy. But you're talking about people who were and are
theoretically working from home. So you seem to be begging the question. Am I
missing something?

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WalterBright
Looks like Amazon invested into that business at just the right moment.

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digitalice
Webvan 2020!

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jblarneyforward
B B m f em m

L

