
The Same-Day War: Amazon, Google And Walmart Race To Bring Your Groceries - gitah
http://www.forbes.com/sites/jeffbercovici/2014/04/16/the-same-day-war-amazon-google-and-walmart-race-to-bring-your-groceries/
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ChuckMcM
Having been a webvan customer (mentioned in the article) this race always
amazes me. It seems like such a suicide mission.

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lsc
>Having been a webvan customer (mentioned in the article) this race always
amazes me. It seems like such a suicide mission.

It's a little like pets.com, I think. A website to sell dogfood is not a
fundamentally unreasonable business to run.

The problem comes when you start buying superbowl ads for your dogfood-selling
website before you are turning a profit.

Safeway has been delivering since at least the first dot-com, and they are
doing okay.

Amazon is approaching this point, but unlike Safeway, they don't come by with
a refrigerated truck, so I can't get my produce through them. I would watch
them, though; If anyone is going to become the giant in this space, it's
amazon.

As a Safeway delivery customer? the majority of the value I see isn't in
driving the food the mile or so it is to my house, but in letting me choose
what I want on a website, rather than making me wander through an ever-
changing labyrinth looking for what I want.

Amazon is really, really good at that sort of thing. The only thing they need,
really, is a contract with a delivery company that runs refrigerated trucks.

I don't think grocery delivery is a suicide mission, even same-day grocery
delivery; certainly not if you look at delivery as part of your retail
operations.

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nanidin
Amazon already does some refrigerated deliveries for limited areas with Amazon
Fresh[0].

[0] [https://fresh.amazon.com/](https://fresh.amazon.com/)

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funkyy
The best part of services like this is that you can use it once every month-
two to deliver all the large products. 20 large bottles of water, red bulls,
watermelons, frozen stuff, soda drinks - all delivered to your doorstep (even
if you live in the apartment they will bring it to you up the stairs). I am
not really happy about buying regular food and fresh products from them, but
for heavy/bulk products this is amazing.

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ape4
kitty litter!

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joesmo
It's hardly a race anymore. Home delivery of groceries has been around for
about a decade now. Webvan may have been a spectacular failure, but they're
hardly even worth mentioning. Many supermarkets offer it and Instacart has
really perfected the art. It doesn't come without downsides, however. The
price markup is one. The bigger downside, IMO, is the lack of variety.
Instacart has pretty good variety and multiple stores to choose from, but it
still doesn't even come close to visiting one supermarket. Hopefully someone
will figure this problem out.

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r00fus
Some other downsides:

(1) Store gets to guess on what to do if your item isn't actually in stock -
you can provide a bit of guidance, but sometimes the replacement is bad.

(2) Sometimes groceries get delivered with really aggressive sell-by dates
(like one lb of ham slices that's got 3 days of shelf life left)... happened
on a Safeway delivery.

(3) Occasionally I thought I clicked through and didn't, and other times one
of my credit cards has a hold (fraud alert) or has been cancelled (thanks
Target!) and the account still has it. (this happened a couple times with
Google because they don't charge your card until your delivery is on the
road).

Strangely I haven't noticed a significant price increase vs. shopping at
stores.

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joesmo
For #1, I usually just do no replacements unless I definitely would want
either the first choice or replacement. It also depends on who does
deliveries. When I got Safeway delivery directly, it was messed up all the
time by the shoppers (probably the biggest downside with some services), but
Instacart was generally very good about following my preferences. Of course,
with no replacements, you might end up without some important ingredients so
that can definitely be a problem still.

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sizzle
anyone else put off by the idea of having someone else inspect/pick out your
fresh produce?

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Spooky23
I'm more put off by people not inspecting and simply picking up produce. The
sorry state of merchandising for produce these days requires a sharp eye.

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jonny_eh
These days? Unless you're talking about "organic" food, produce has never been
uniformly of such high quality.

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mrsaint
Groceries is pretty much the last one thing I buy in brick and mortar stores.
Please don't take this away from me. ;)

The article mentions, "Forrester predicts 10% of U.S. sales will be via
e-commerce by 2017" \-- I cannot believe it's only 10%!

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mtalantikite
Living in (most part's of) NYC it's pretty easy to just walk a few blocks and
be in a grocery store. I actually enjoy grocery shopping, it's where I get
ideas about what to cook or discover ingredients I've never used before.

This probably would be most useful in locations encompassing food deserts, but
of course it looks like they're largely targeting affluent neighborhoods.

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mstefanko
In SF I literally walk past a grocery store every day, I enjoy the occasional
grocery shopping, but I can't get enough of these services. I work long enough
hours that I rarely have time during the week, so that may account for my view
point. But I'll say, once you start using one, it's hard to go back. With a
company like instacart, if i'm at that point in the week and I don't have what
I need to make dinner, instead of getting take out on the regular, I can get
what I need dropped off immediately without dropping what I'm doing. With
amazonfresh, I no longer need to do a week long or two week long shopping
trip. Fresh produce every day. There's way less waste, at least than what I
used to go through. I do still see value in the occaisional trip to the
grocery store for reasons you mentioned, but when I do stop now, it's fast,
and never on one of those extremely busy weekend days where half of the trip
is me standing in a line trying not to block the cereal aisle. In addition,
there's one major convenience other than getting large amounts of time back,
and reducing waste, I can order what I purchased previously. No thought
needed, there's enough duplicate items that going through the mundane process
of picking up the exact same carton of milk every week, becomes pointless.

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vanattab
Have there been any studies as to if this type of service increases or
decreases the "carbon footprint" of the food. My gut instinct says it would
increase it at least until there is a certain critical mass of orders in a
geographical area.

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ape4
A truck can take a circuit and deliver to a bunch of people.

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neutronman
I don't know how they will make money but I don't care. I love this.

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calbear81
3rd parties like Instacart mark up the groceries from the places they deliver
from. I believe the margins fluctuate but probably average 20%+.

