The fast grocery delivery business was waiting on a crash. It doesn't make sense that there's Getir, gorillas, gopuff, zapp and beelivery. Plus deliveroo, Uber eats, and Amazon prime now. Probably more that I haven't heard of. All for inefficient delivery of small quantities of low value items. I have a supermarket a 5 minute walk away, I just don't get it.
Are these grocery-delivery services popular in the states / somwehere else? Never understood the market for them in the EU. Either you live in a city, have - at worst - 10-15 min to walk to a store, or you live outside a city where it is 10-15 min with a car to a store and the service is not available. They will die as soon as they stop subsidize the cost with VC money.
To be honest, I live a two minutes walk from my grocery store and I’ve used these services a few times. Sometimes with discount codes they’re been cheaper than my grocery store, but we all know that’s just setting VC money on fire for customer acquisition. Thanks for the free beers VCs! When I don’t have a discount code I usually use these services if I’m feeling sick.
Anecdote of course but I'm in the states and I love grocery delivery. It's far better, imo, than food delivery ever was. I can order my groceries a few minutes before I get off work and by the time I get home I have everything I need to cook supper.
I'm generally not a huge fan of hyper-convience and often take the mentality of "I can just do it myself" but in this case I very much embrace the delivery of groceries.
We have found the quality of groceries delivered to often be lackluster. Worse than curb delivery even, where unrelated substitutes, messed up produce, and expired food are fairly common.
Think winter, rain, snow
Babies
Single parents
Not wanting to get dressed
Etc
There is a market but agree not large enough to sustain this much competition
In most of these conditions you can usually plan ahead and use the delivery function of any of the major supermarkets - at half the price and ten times the selection. Their delivery window might be a one-hour slot tomorrow, but for anything but impulse purchases or shopping for the 1%ers that's mighty fine.
They launched around me last month at around 50 cents per delivery and I used it quite a bit. Now that the introductory period is over and the fee is 1.50, I just get off my ass and walk.
The funny thing is if they launched with $2.50 delivery and cut the price to $1.50, I think many people would feel differently about the current price.
I feel the same about these electric scooter services like Bird, Lime, etc. Most European cities are very walkeable and so you’re not “getting another car off the road” as Bird will happily tell you. You’re paying for the luxury that you’re 2 minutes faster compared to walking.
I pay for that luxury, and I like it. For me it‘s a short-distance bicycle without the parking problem (i.e. need to pick up my bike later). I live in Stockholm.
For longer distances I prefer bicycles. In London, for example, the Santander bikes are fantastic.
The problem with this in my city is that the scooters are substantially more expensive than the taxi, which doesn't make any sense. I've often found that I can choose between a 1h scooter ride or a 30m taxi ride, and the scooter would be about twice the price.
I've used them a few times just for the fun of riding, and they are probably cheaper for very short distances, but that's it.
That's splitting hairs. Restaurants can be fancy or functional, they can serve fast food or slow food etc. McDonald's is a restaurant, as is The Fat Duck.
What they all have in common, and the main appeal, is that they cook things better or faster or with less effort than you would, and they spare you the effort of cleaning up afterwards.
I think you may be ascribing more weight to the etymology of food trucks than is intended. Most food trucks one finds in small to mid sized urban areas are small, effective restaurants in outdoor dining areas. Absolutely part of the experience.
The market for them is in the comfort. While cooking you notice that something is missing, oh can't leave as the oven is running, so you order what is missing. Or the baby cries and you don't want to put it in the stroller and go out to get something, or you are watching the championship game on TV, but chips and beer are out, so you order.
How to make a working business out of that, however is the question. Margin and value isn't high enough, especially as the space is quite competed.
It works better for the weekly groceries run. Instead of wasting time in the shop and carrying into the apartment just order the things needed.
Euro here. Closest supermarket is small with lame variety. And I hate big supermarkets in big malls. It also helps to stay away from impulsive purchases (= aka junk food).
Delivery will probably stop once investors no longer finance it (here it's mostly supermarket chains financing delivery). Hopefuully click-to-collect survives. Seems like a good compromise.
It's much more convenient if you have a system for doing groceries. Compare visiting 2 stores in walking distance (~ 90 minutes total) vs putting a predefined list into your basket and optionally add or remove a few items (~ 10 minutes).
You can easily do that in Germany with some traditional supermarket chains, e.g. REWE, create your online basket, then when ready do the 5 minute walk to pick it up without dealing with the supermarket confusion.
Amazon Go in Spain and the supermarket deliveries in the UK are hugely popular because a lot of people don't have cars in the larger cities - so it's very convenient to get everything delivered in one batch.
From people I know who uses them, it seems to be mostly useful because you can get things delivered to you in like one hour instead of having to have it delivered next week, which the service the supermarkets themselves offer. Some companies even can deliver groceries in just 10-15 minutes.
> you can get things delivered to you in like one hour instead of having to have it delivered next week, which the service the supermarkets themselves offer.
I just checked Sainsburys (a major supermarket in the UK for anyone who doesn't know it), and I can book a delivery slot for 6 hours from now for £4. It's not an hour, but it's definitely not a week.
I checked all the major supermarkets in the south-western EU country I'm in for the week, all give me delivery times for next week, FWIW, YMMV and yadda yadda.
Have you tried the "ultrafast" ones? I tried it for the first time a couple months ago and it's pretty mind-blowing. An order of 15 different items reaches my door literally 11 minutes after I press the "submit order" button. I'm in the UK and I have a supermarket a ~5 minute walk away but picking up the same items myself from there would take me at least twice as long (not including the time to get ready/dressed etc). I don't use it for all my shopping (it's a bit more expensive, but it's mostly because I like to get out of the house) but the convenience and speed of the ultrafast app delivery is really something. I hope they don't all crash and burn.
For me the service they offer is exchanging money for time:
Going into a shop is more than the walk or drive. It is looking for a product, waiting in line if there is a line to pay, start the car, drive back, look for a parking spot. I would say that shopping 2-3 products from a 10-15 minute store, could cost at least 30 to 60 minutes time if going on foot and if driving probably more than one hour.
I count this time from the moment I decide I have the need until I am back home.
If a grocery delivery service can buy in the same time from the same store for at least two people I would say they also decrease fuel consumption. This could be a long shot.
You'd think, but online supermarket delivery is pretty well established in some European countries. Tesco in the UK and Superquinn in Ireland launched services in 2000 or so (iirc the superquinn one wasn't strictly even internet-based to start with; they gave you software on a CD that just dialed their modems...). Though the fact that supermarket delivery is well-established makes these third party grocery delivery services even more baffling, really.
I have a (discount) supermarket literally next door, but I still have groceries delivered once a week. The quality is better, the selection is better, I don't have to lug around cases of beer like I did at university. There is no venture capital involved, it's not cheap, they've been doing this for many years, and there is one delivery per week, ordered three days in advance.
I was wondering about it, too. I used it maybe twice to deliver heavier items like 24 liters of water. The prices were similar if not higher and in the case of vegetables I couldn't check them before buying, so I see little point in using it. It's not a big deal to just visit a grocery on my way home, and it's not an unpleasant experience, so why should I get rid of it?
The market is convenience. There are obviously people who will pay a fee to avoid a 40 minute round trip at a time which isn't convenient for them. Whether that fee will be enough to cover costs is not clear. And it's always going to be the first thing that people cut back on if they feel any financial pressures.
I've been using grocery delivery since 2019 and it's great. The traffic is so bad I hated having to drive to shop and carrying by hand for the whole family was difficult.
If you live in a big city you're unlikely to have a car. I lived in London for 15 years and the only people who had cars were those who needed it for work.
I use such deliveries occasionally (Glovo, mostly) for items that are maybe a 30m+ walk away, and that I forgot to order. For example, I'm after work, I realize I'm out of cat food, I'm too tired to spend 1h+ walking, and taking a cab is as expensive (it also happens that public transport between this particular store and my home is really bad). So, I order a bag of cat food off Glovo and get it delivered 30m-1h later. If I ordered from the store it would arrive 2-4 days later, and I can't find the brand my cats eat anywhere closer.
Now, this is just a small convenience - it won't change my life if the service goes away, and I don't use it often at all, but it's nice to have. I don't think they have any chance of making the money back on such order though.
It's great for old people without cars, so they can order a bunch of heavy/bulky items (drinks, toilet paper,...) and have it delivered. But this is usually handled by first party (store) deliveries and is not time-critical.
with enough VC money, anyone can reinvent the wheel many times and fail at it.
The thing is, there is a business there but it only works with economies of scale. If they're constantly focused on eating each other it won't work because you have multiple "networks" each with a finite, unevenly-distributed share of supply (restaurants), delivery drivers and demand (customers) that can't share load between each other (so you end up with situations where one company's drivers doing nothing while another one doesn't have enough capacity - both end up losing money).
A business providing ultra-fast courier service providing order matching & routing that otherwise stays neutral and charges a delivery fee (as opposed to skimming off the entire bill) would work.
That is only partially true, at least here in Europe, I notice many riders and drivers working for multiple companies at the same time. So these company they do share load. You can notice this easily when you take an Uber and you put your trolley in the cargo and notice that there are a Bolt and an Uber eats thermal box
Getir expanded into much more than grocery delivery, I use their food delivery quite often. They even do rent-a-car, taxi hailing and job board.
Also, in Turkey, every major supermarket chain has its own delivery platform and they are quite popular. It's useful, you don't spend your time shopping for everyday necessities because you can quickly order and pay for your frequent purchases instead of riding a shopping cart for half an hour to pick up the exact same stuff every few days.
I mostly used those during the height of the pandemic, with the restrictions on how many people could be inside an store and even how worried I was of getting sick with a small child at home and very far from my family. But now, I have lot's of options very close to home and very few worries (Although I mask myself when inside the store)
Same. Absolutely bonkers but a few people on my street do use it so ...
Honourable positive mention for Getir though.
In our area, they were the first/only(?) one who invested in electric mopeds so we don't hear the incessant noise of mopeds going back and forth down our road. Hopefully this becomes the norm.
Crappy article, with no mention of which country each of this company is based. I've done the research for them:
* Nuri: Germany
* Klarna: Sweden
* Getir: Turkey
* Gorillas: Germany
* Zapp: Germany (unsure)
* Kry: Sweden
* Hopin: United Kingdom
FWIW, I've never heard of any of them. Sounds like they're all startups. 'Tis not a great time for startups, but I wouldn't cry for "the tech company layoffs have hit Europe" just yet. The whole startup market has been extremely overvalued for a while, a little downturn is not necessarily cause for panic, in fact might be healthy.
Klarna is quite large, and I'm a bit surprised to see them on the list since I thought they were doing quite well and there's real economies of scale in their business (digital payments & financing). As for the rest, meh.
At least here in Finland Klarna engages in borderline-shady tactics. They use all the dark patterns you can think of to get your personal identity number even if you choose a payment method that doesn't require it, presumably to combine data from various sources. They skip the difficult identity-verification steps to make the checkout go faster, which of course means they can be easily used for fraud, and it falls to the unfortunate bystander whose identity was stolen to report the fraud and return the goods.
I and a lot of friends avoid Klarna checkouts to the point of choosing a more expensive shop or ordering from outside the country.
And they have done so for many years and seem to have a huge market share. I am suprised to see them characterized as a start-up. For me they are an established shady business I'd always avoid.
For those who don't understand the problem: The Finnish legal system does not understand the difference between identification and authentication: By using someone's national personal id you can make debt and the owner of the id has little chances of not having to pay it back.
Hopin is a virtual conference system ("conference" as in tech conference). It got a lot of traction due to the pandemic and seems very popular, and I've used it both as a guest and as a presenter.
However the system itself is kind of odd. They've taken the literal approach to tracks, sessions, backstage, etc. which has lots of drawbacks - eg. it's completely modal - you cannot be in two sessions at once or easily jump between sessions without everything resetting. You have no visibility of what's happening elsewhere: we had to station someone on the home screen to tell new visitors to press a particular session button because otherwise you wouldn't know where the action is happening. The interface is clunky in many small ways too - there is chat which is threaded, but it doesn't work like any other chat I've used. As a presenter it wasn't very clear to me when I was actually live "on stage".
So I don't think it's the pinnacle of virtual conference software. As with video conferencing, I think someone is going to find a formula one day which massively disrupts this space.
If you lived in a city where something like Gorrillas or Getir have a presence, then it’d be impossible not to know of them. They advertise like crazy and you see their delivery drivers and dark stores all over.
My only insight is from what I heard in the all-in podcast. They were saying that the VC market is pretty much shut and this will likely be the case as long as the Fed is applying hard brakes on monetary policy, so loss making startups that relied on the next round of fund raising need to assume no more money for at least a couple of years, and restructure their burn rate to survive that long. Hence the layoffs.
One more data point, me. Never heard of any of the startups in the linked article. That one links another article about startups that are hiring. Among them I know Bitmovin (I didn't know it's in Austria) and Algolia (I didn't know it's French.)
Physically due to it's geography(the arbitrary division of Asia/Europe aside, Turkey has a very significant population(over 10 Million people) on its officially European lands), culturally due to it's history(The Ottoman Empire has had its significant chunk in Eastern Europe), Culturally(Turks have quite an European culture despite the Islamic influence. That's what happens when you live for generations in Europe. Do I have to mention that the roots of many European cultures are in Turkey. Have you heard of Hagia Sofia for example?). The Turkish economy and Turkish institutions are deeply integrated with the European ones, that's still true despite the damage the Erdogan caused.
It's True that Turks are not much like the Germans or the Dutch but they are like the Greeks, the Spanish and the Hungarians.
The camels and the belly dancers are Tourist attractions. Not to be confused with how Turks live.
So? Peace in Europe is something unusual and we were lucky to have it from 1945 to 2022. The history of Europe is a bloodbath and the Turks took part in it. It's one of the reasons why Turkey is a European country, actually.
>Are you insane? The Hagia Sofia was built by Greeks centuries before the Turks arrived off the steppe.
Notice how the ancient Greek stuff is in Turkey now. Unlike the British, Turks did not move it. That's why I say the ancient European history is in Turkey, that's why Turkey is a European country.
Apart for the dominant religion, Everything about Turkey is European. Oh, and the dominant European religion has deep roots in Turkey and I'm not talking just about Hagia Sophia.
You should take a long vacation in Turkey. Huge enlightenment awaits you.
You mention the past. So many things have changed since then.
I am Spanish and I take offence at being compared to a Turk.
Turkey is a Muslim country that is completely placed in Asia with forced marriage and honour killings. There have been recent talks of bringing back the death penalty[]. Erdogan is the true face of the country despite the whitewashing that had been happening in the recent decades.
The fact that you are a self-admitted bigot (taking offense at being compared to any member of an entire group is the definition of bigotry)doesn't entitle you to change history or geography.
Turkey is geographically partly in Europe. Istanbul sits on the historical border between Europe and Asia, and there is a chuck of land west of Istanbul that is Turkish. In fact, there are parts of Turkey on the European mainland that are farther west than much of Ukraine or Moldova.
Islam is an important part of the culture of many European countries - Spain in particular has significant historical Muslim influence, especially in your architecture. Several majority-Muslim countries are firmly in Europe - Bosnia and Herzegovina, Albania, North Macedonia. There are significant Muslim minorities in a few other countries - Bulgaria, Cyprus, Montenegro, Georgia. Even in Western Europe, there are significant Muslim minorities in many of the old colonial empires - France, Belgium, Sweden, The Netherlands, UK.
Not to mention, Turkey is still a secular country, even if Erdogan seems poised to turn it towards fundamentalism unfortunately.
A man could have seen both the Turkish conquest of Constantinople and the Moors being driven out of Spain in the same lifetime; yet you let the Turks take credit for the pre-conquest Hagia Sophia (which they didn't build), while also subordinating Spanish civilization to their Moorish predecessors.
The importance of the Hagia Sophia being in Turkey is to remind everyone that that land is indeed part of Europe, and has deep cultural ties to other parts of Europe, even if it was later conquered by the Turks. Anyone claiming that Istanbul is not part of Europe has to also claim that Constantinople was not a part of Europe. Not to mention, the Turks borrowed a great deal of culture from the Byzantines whose land they conquered. It's not like they burned down their cities and killed all the people - the Ottoman Empire was to a great extent built around the legacy of the Byzantine (Roman) empire. Even ethnically, most Turks today are much closer to the Greeks and Romans living in Byzantium than to the original Turkish conquerors (who were of Mongol descent), at least in the western parts of the country.
The Hagia Sophia can also act as a nice symbol of this: it is largely identical to the church that emperor ~Julian~ Justinian commissioned (the last Roman emperor to ever hold Rome, though only briefly), but it has been repurposed as a mosque, with two minarets added and several parts of the church re-painted for Islamic sensibilities. An Islamic church built on the structure of the old Roman/Greek one.
As for Spain, the situation is similar: when the medieval Europeans invaded Spain and (re-)conquered it, they then borrowed quite a bit from the culture that the Moors left behind there, as is plainly visible in Spanish architecture of the time and later, even up to the present. Of course, the Moors themselves had been influenced by the Roman & Spanish culture that they found when they originally conquered the peninsula themselves.
Edit: small correction - Justinian conquered Rome and had the Hagia Sophia built, not Julian.
Turkey is not a muslim country but a country with majority of its population being muslim. Forced marriages and honour killings are illegal activities in the rural regions that are becoming thing of the past thanks to the active measures taken. Arranged marriages are still common in the rural parts but almost non-existent in the cities.
And no, Turkey has no death penalty. Politicians may say that they would re-introduce it when they speak to their extremist voters and they had the political power for a decade to re-introduce but they never did. Do you know why? Because it's an extremely unpopular among the Turks.
So you’re just going full mask off and telling us you’re a bigot? Spain being a major contributor to racism and not always considered white must pain you.
Respectfully disagree. The line is not arbitrary. Turkey is the beginning of Asia geographically, culturally and historically. Hagia Sophia is not Turkish-made (obviously).They have an offensive military dogma towards all their neighbors and routinely fail every measure of "democratic" law. Erdogan still represents the majority and the government is in bed with the extreme right party. They invaded Iraq and Syria, they routinely suppress their Kurdish minority.
Can you give some arguments instead of statements? For example, maybe you can explain your reasoning why do you think that Turkey is geographically in Asia? Maybe you can explain why do you think that Turkey, the successor of an empire with more than 500+ years in Europe is Asian? A country deeply integrated with Europe is culturally asian?
Then we can see if you have a point. There's no use to disagree by just saying something different and give no reasoning.
And the "They invaded Iraq and Syria" statement is so ridiculous that I don't see point in arguing over it. If it's not clear, Google the topic and look closely at the dates of the military activities of UK/France/USA in these countries. You should also Google for George Bush and Tony Blair. Check out the British sentiment for Tony Blair's dealings with Bush. Look closely, why the British leftist are still bitter with Tony Blair's affair with George Bush? Look for videos of "Muhammad Saeed al-Sahhaf".
Plays football and basketball in their European federations. Probably any other sport too. Apart from that I personally think of Turkey as Middle East, Asia.
Why are Europe and Asia considered two continents? I wonder if some people would love for Israel to be considered European…but of course not the rest of the area around it…you know why. Wink wink.
>Why are Europe and Asia considered two continents?
Because the ancient Greek cartographers thought they were clearly separated, and the convention just stuck. Of course its easier for us to see it differently with satellite imagery.
I was inferring modern racism is why it is nearly embedded into our culture. I don’t think so many people would have issues with Turkey being European if they were paler and Christian.
That is a very short list. I don't think this is really news, especially since they are fairly spread out in time and some were... predictable given the markets those companies were in.
On another topic, every time I visit sifted (I keep tabs on startup valuations and investments in Europe), their inconsistent use of "\" and "/" in headlines triggers my OCD...
- New market is discovered
- 10’s of companies enter simultaneously
- Only some survive
For the convenience grocery delivery in our city we have:
- Gorillaz
- FLINK
- Getir
They all suddenly show up at the same time with giant makreting campaigns and now there’ll be regulations dictating where they can and can’t have their stores.
It’s no surprise that at least some of these companies won’t make it. Especially since the regular grocery delivery business is also expanding (Picnic, Pieter Pot, Albert Heijn, Jumbo, Plus).
They are hugely popular in my city (and others in dense populated cities/cities with high student populations).
I think a major reason is thought:
- They’re all entering the same market at the same time doing huge marketing campaigns. I can’t imagine this will lead to any profits. With food deliveries being extremely competitive and regular grocery prices also being extremely competitive, it must be hard to make money. Especially with so many competitors from the start.
- Increasing regulations, they’re no longer allowed to open in city centres and being forced to locate in business parks/outside areas. This ruins their whole “delivered in 5 min!!!” promise and makes it take longer than walking to a grocery store with cheaper prices.
Hmm. Is sifted.eu trying to stir up something here? It is only a small number companies out of thousands of companies. Now if the companies were Addidas, BMW, or Aldi, then we should start to get worried.
Just preparing I guess. If you’re a startup and you start worrying by the time BMW is laying people off, you’ve started worrying too late to do anything about it. The time to act is now. That’s the point.
What do you mean? Checkout layoffs.fyi for recent layoffs in tech, plenty of layoffs in US.
I have to say I'm not very surprised by any of these companies except maybe Klarna. Fast-delivery companies which probably never can be profitable in EU and Kry who's farming government subsidies.
I've not seen a single tech layoff around me. In fact it's quite the opposite, there's very high demand in IT. Of course that might be tunnel vision, but I don't feel Europe's tech workers are particularily worried.
Interesting, unsurprising, but not actually true. General layoff trackers show plenty happening in other places as well and don’t show Europe leading the way.
Europe was riding on cheap money with little actual innovation. Along with stricter and stricter regulations that makes it even harder to do something productive. It feels like we were just printing money whole decade.
Ukraine war is probably hitting Europe much harder than US or far east.
I don't agree with your first point (how would you even quantify that?)
But the second point is absolutely true. The cost of living crisis in Europe is far more acute due to the effect on natural gas prices and some other items (cooking oil, etc.). The increase in interest rates has also been much greater.
That leads to consumers cutting discretionary spending at a much faster rate, killing off loads of "nice-to-have" startups dependent on that like grocery delivery, cheap credit, etc.
And as the Americans say - "we ain't seen nothing yet"
I see very few european innovations/businesses that are actually making a change in the long run. Okay, we got new loan sharks, new rental services, etc.. Basically existing stuff just using new technologies to grow ever bigger and become monopolies. Selling investors the idea that if they drop €€€€, maaaaybe they can corner the market in the future.
US got Tesla. Yet who is threatening Euro too-big-to-fail car manufacturing behemoths?
Yet manufacturing is still moving away to Asia and energy issues are ever present with many anti-nuclear advocates with questionable funding. And instead of fixing actual societal issues some twats want to play Euro Empire Building out of EU. But same twats can't even defend an ally in a bloody war.
Cooking oil is a meaningful part of the cost of living crisis? I’d wager that cooking oil could 10x (and maybe 100x) in price and I’d never notice it in my budget.
