
Stuart, The Same-Hour Delivery Startup Raises €22M Pre-Launch - cocoflunchy
http://techcrunch.com/2015/11/18/stuart-stealth/
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saosebastiao
Venture backed delivery businesses have jumped the shark. EUR 2.99 for a
delivery? For city-wide point to point? Within an hour?

Pizza delivery companies have been doing this for decades, but they've been
surviving off of a product that has >$20 sales prices and >90% margins pre-
delivery, paying below-subsistence wages, aggregating deliveries due to meal
time peak behavior, consolidating pickup areas to single restaurant locations,
and constraining delivery areas to something more akin to a neighborhood than
an entire city.

Amazon has tried for years to get low margin grocery delivery to work with
sophisticated state of the art logistics software and the cash flow muscle of
Amazon to push for market penetration and subsequent delivery density, and the
_only_ strategy that worked for them was raising prices. There is no way this
business goes anywhere without changing their pricing model or the laws of
physics.

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shostack
How about the delivery mechanism?

When drone delivery takes off, shipping will be turned on its head once the
maximum carry weight and flight duration improve. Then <1hr delivery will be
the norm for much of this stuff, you'll have a fraction of the human capital
costs, and many other benefits.

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untog
_When drone delivery takes off, shipping will be turned on its head_

Sure. Then launch a startup doing drone delivery when it is viable. These guys
will burn through their funding _long_ before that happens.

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shostack
Totally agree that they will. Personally, I'm curious to see what happens to
all these delivery/food delivery startups when the economy slows and people
have less disposable income for urgent delivery of non-essential items.

