
Blue Apron falls 9% on fourth day as a public company - janober
https://techcrunch.com/2017/07/05/blue-apron-falls-9-on-fourth-day-as-a-public-company
======
Someone1234
These companies are going to get absolutely destroyed when the big
supermarkets come on tap.

Several are working on identical services where you pick up, curbside, the
ingredients and instructions in a bag, and pay significantly less for doing
so.

Why have your ingredients mailed to you when a supermarket on your way home
will offer the same thing for 50% cheaper?

~~~
handedness
While I don't disagree, people said the same thing about Amazon.

The supermarkets have changed very little about the way they've done business
in the last half-century, and as such I have a difficult time imagining them
doing a good job executing on something like this.

I've also tested the majority of the meal and food delivery services out
there, and my experience meshes well with the above: the local supermarket
chain in some ways provides a better offering than anyone (as they
should–you're absolutely right about that), but for a few years now they've
persisted in making sure the actual execution is the worst I've experienced of
any service. I can't see that changing until they completely overhaul their
hiring practices and put sufficient processes in place to ensure good
execution.

(For the record, Blue Apron strikes me as a pretty mediocre product at a
pretty uninteresting price, executed in a pretty bad manner.)

~~~
sharkmerry
>> While I don't disagree, people said the same thing about Amazon.

just to play devil's avocado, Amazon's advantage was not having the overhead
of stores, now they just purchased whole foods. Seems as if they are moving
towards being a supermarket

~~~
handedness
Sorry, I was referring to how it was obvious to so many that Barnes & Noble
and Borders would crush this fledgling website founded by the kook who set out
in a van to compete with them.

~~~
code_duck
There was some of that... generally, skepticism that internet startups would
become large enough to challenge businesses like Walmart, ever.
[https://www.forbes.com/sites/ericjackson/2015/09/24/revisiti...](https://www.forbes.com/sites/ericjackson/2015/09/24/revisiting-
amazon-dot-bomb-16-years-later/#6b40b816b08f)

And also people saying things like tiny businesses of people with bookstores
in their spare time will make Amazon obsolete...
[https://mobile.nytimes.com/1999/02/26/opinion/foreign-
affair...](https://mobile.nytimes.com/1999/02/26/opinion/foreign-affairs-
amazonyou.html)

Ah, Thomas Friedman. Thanks for the advice to not buy amazon stock in 1999.

~~~
imron
Out of curiosity, I went to have a look at AMZN's stock price at the date the
article was published, to see how the stock price during the heady heights of
the dotcom bubble compared to today.

Interestingly, if you view the entire stock history price chart, the dotcom
bubble is barely a blip.

~~~
sokoloff
IMO, the right way to look at long-term performance of an investment is on a
semi-log chart. (Day or week charts, I prefer linear; anything 3 month or
longer, I prefer semi-log.)

Semi-log (where constant percentage changes are constant-sized), it's more
than a blip. Linear (where constant dollar changes are constant-sized)
charting hides past market moves if the overall bias has been up and
exaggerates past market moves if the overall bias has been down. This can lead
investors to improperly discount the pain/gain cycle that happened over that
time period.

Linear charting: [http://bit.ly/2tk5Ulj](http://bit.ly/2tk5Ulj)

Semi log: [http://bit.ly/2sJs7ec](http://bit.ly/2sJs7ec)

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kkotak
The difference between companies like Blue Apron and Amazon is that one is
created with a "I think I want to do a startup, any startup that's in vogue
nowadays. I know people who can take me to IPO" mindset and the other "there
is a clear business opportunity in bringing efficiencies in the retail books
business. The time is right since all the underlying infrastructure (PCs, wide
internet access, Credit cards, USPS/UPS, etc.) needed for such an opportunity
to succeed are present; all it needs is a strong execution path and leadership
to have a go at it" mindset.

~~~
Waterluvian
I call this "playing startup."

Edit: possibly not my own thought, for whatever that means. I just don't want
to accidentally suggest to others that I steal thoughts. See child comments.

~~~
ice109
oh really? you sure it's you and not Paul Graham that calls it that? like
don't you realize you're literally on a site started by the guy that coined
that phrase: everyone here is already familiar with it and the correct
attribution.

~~~
Waterluvian
I'm not here to convince you of anything, but I will say with all genuine
honesty I don't know who Paul Graham is. I'm here because I got tired of
reddit and my friends said there's more tech news here.

I also think that "playing startup" is so obvious that many people could have
come up with it. That being said, it's also quite possible that I saw it
somewhere and absorbed it without fully remembering the source and now have a
false memory of coming up with it myself.

I will add though that it's pretty fascinating as someone who is so
disinterested in (and at times has a disdain for) startup people and startup
culture, to be accused along the lines of, "how dare you feign not knowing who
Startup Person X is!"

~~~
dreamcompiler
Surfing Hacker News without knowing who Paul Graham is, is like shopping at
Amazon without knowing who Jeff Bezos is. There's absolutely nothing wrong
with it but it seems a bit odd to some of us. That doesn't make it okay to be
rude to you.

~~~
lazaroclapp
Would be willing to bet you less than 1% of Amazon shoppers worldwide know who
Jeff Bezos is...

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nsnick
Does anyone actually use Blue Apron? They seem to do promotions all the time
and yet, I don't know anyone who actually uses their service.

~~~
mmmpop
In the last big Blue Apron thread I participated in, I found it a bit
suspicious how many people were just rabid about the company, the product, and
the service and how it was "simply gourmet and such better food than [insert
fast casual chain]" and "how dare you compare the quality!", etc.

I'm not so paranoid to think that the whole crowd were interested/biased
parties, but I can't help wonder if they've convinced themselves that the
absurd cost is actually worth it. I've tried it and I don't find the quality
to even as good than that of say, Modern Market or some other slightly-upscale
eatery.

~~~
nilkn
Blue Apron seems to inspire surprisingly passionate discussions here.
Detractors tend to be very negative and even a bit hostile, and I suspect that
maybe puts fans of the service on the defensive or makes them feel like they
have to praise it more than it really deserves. So far this thread is very
civil though.

I've tried it and enjoyed it. I found it to be a high-quality service.
Negative points were (1) trash; (2) I didn't like most of the vegetarian
meals, and I'm trending towards a more vegetarian diet; (3) I prefer to cook
simple meals at home that generate leftovers (so that I don't have to cook
every night), but BA meals tend to be complex, messy to prepare, and do not
create any leftovers. These three points were easily sufficient to stop me
from using it long-term.

(1) is a topic of a lot of argument. Some insist BA creates mass amounts of
waste compared to normal grocery shopping. Others contend the difference is
much smaller or even nonexistent when looking at "average" grocery shoppers.
I'm in the middle. I think the waste is exaggerated, but still greater than
what the average shopper would produce.

~~~
sokoloff
We used it for about 6 months (or maybe a little more) a few years ago. I got
it for my wife who enjoys cooking and enjoyed the "semi-forced" variety.
Several of the meals (or close variants) are now in our regular rotation at
home.

I'd say we were glad on balance that we tried it.

Cons:

Incredibly expensive for what you get. (Obviously; they're paying a large
amount for shipping and a large amount for marketing.)

Ingredients were generally acceptable quality, the chicken was quite good but
the beef was pretty uniformly terrible. (I often thought back to Rodney
Dangerfield's quote in Caddyshack: "this steak still has marks from where the
jockey was hitting it!")

After a few months, the variety/novelty factor wears off and then it just
becomes an incredibly expensive way to get a small amount of groceries
delivered.

I don't want to seem like I'm grinding an axe, but it also annoyed me greatly
that there's no web UX accessible way to cancel your account online. (You have
to call and talk to a human.) Solution: google for the hidden cancellation
page or just remember every few weeks to google "blue apron" or "plated" and
click on a paid ad to bring you to the site and cancel the deliveries for the
next six weeks. :) That makes their churn numbers look lower, but their SEM
expenses higher...

~~~
freehunter
Weird, I canceled Blue Apron twice from their website. Maybe they removed that
because it was too easy to cancel.

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cdubzzz
I find it interesting that none of the discussion here has been around CSAs.
Are these less of a thing, even in other cities? In the D.C. area there are
_tons_ of them. They provide really great variety and I suspect many also
include recipie ideas with each box (the one my wife and I used did). Most
will deliver to nearby farmers markets and in our case they had enough
customers in our apartment building to deliver there directly. We learned so
much about different types and combinations of ingredients in that time. It
was a lot of fun and made for some delicious meals.

~~~
nhdoaeu78ao
It could be that there's no discussion of CSAs because nobody here knows what
they are. I certainly don't. Can you explain? Searching, I get Client-Server
Architecture, Community Supported Agriculture, Compliance Safety &
Accountability, and more. I assume it's the second one? What does it involve?

~~~
cdubzzz
Adding to undersuit's response, here's a wapo article about the CSA scene in
the D.C. area (in 2015): [http://wapo.st/1AlQgSF](http://wapo.st/1AlQgSF)

Basically you pay a set amount directly to the farm ahead of the harvest
season and get weekly boxes of a variety of different veggies (and some bigger
ones will also do meats and cheeses). Typical they cost around $30-40/week in
this area, but can also be considerably more than that. Usually pick up at a
local farmers' market is necessary. We lucked out with delivery to our door so
some added value in that case for people in larger cities.

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mythrwy
I find the whole concept a bit sad in a way. Kind of like Russian mail order
brides or something.

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petraeus
RCSS does home deliveries from the app now

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ojbyrne
We use one of their (numerous) competitors.

