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This is going to take a bit of magic to pull off. Groceries are very low margin items and people just opt for pre-made restaurant food when we are feeling lazy

• rimantas 10y ago
  There are also moms (and sometimes dads) at home with a small kids. And they may be highly motivated to avoid journey to a grocery store.
  • lujim 10y ago
    Agreed, and I'm in the boat. However those same people tend to have less disposable income and seem to be less apt to pay monthly fees or premiums for luxuries. When you think families think more bulk generic costco toilet paper and less "convenience fee" of any kind
    • jerf 10y ago
      While I agree there's an inevitable correlation there, since children are (reductionistically, financially) an expense and households that have an additional expense will be poorer than their equivalent household without that expense, I think you may still be overstating the poverty-inducing effects of children a wee bit.
      • lujim 10y ago
        I've been Single Income/Single, Dual Income No Kids (DINK), dual income with kids and single income with kids. Kids won't completely destroy your finances but 529 plans/day care alone can put a hurting on your finances. You become much more financially responsible and less likely to pay for luxury services (for yourself) like HBO, Spotify, Netflix, Gym membership, high lease car payment etc after you have kids.
  • fattylite 10y ago
    I understand what you meant, but a trip to the grocery store can also be a perfect way to get their energy out if the kids are particularly bananas that day. So, some parents relish that trip.
    • dougk16 10y ago
      Exactly. For my toddlers I also view it as training in some level of obedience (not running to the other side of the store), social interaction, dealing with disappointment (no you can't have the batman matchbox car set), learning about money (goes in hand with the disappointment factor!), helping me to pick out food, learning what stuff is called, a little hide and seek fun within the obedience bounds...it's like a little slice of life learning all in one place. Overall it is a challenge for a parent though, so I'm not convinced that many won't just stay at home and order food from an app with the kids watching TV.
      • jeremya 10y ago
        This. In my parenting life, I feel there are so many decision where you have to choose between optimizing the short term or the long term. I tend to favor the long term and my philosophy is roughly: the difficult path becomes easier and the easy path becomes more difficult.
  • goatforce5 10y ago
    Loblaws, a big Canadian grocery chain, has really been pushing their Click and Collect service lately. You shop and pay for your groceries online. A staff member will go around the store getting your items, and you park in a designated area in a certain time slot and they bring your groceries out to your car. I guess most people using the service order groceries at the office and pick them up on the drive home. I'm not in their target demo because I don't have kids and my life isn't that busy, but i've been surprised at how busy the designated parking spots seem to be whenever I go to one of their stores. I've just checked their website and there are no fees for using their service as long as you spend $30.
  • soundwave106 10y ago
    I will add the elderly to this list. Especially as the population ages, there's going to be a portion of the population who are well enough to not need some sort of assisted living, but are not going to be okay enough to drive. Grocery delivery service might be very helpful to this group.
• maxerickson 10y ago
  The typical grocery delivery service bumps up the margins.
  • prplhaz4 10y ago
    The typical grocery delivery service also has the luxury of batching orders (controlling cost) and delivers with refrigerated vehicles (consistent product)...seems more sustainable to me...but what do I know - to me, the Uberization of most markets (other than ride sharing) never seems to have a clear win on cost/benefit...
    • mseebach 10y ago
      Also important for cost: An online supermarket can save a ton on rent by having fewer, much bigger fulfilment centres, located in cheaper slightly out of the way industrial zones. Classic supermarkets are generally in commercially attractive areas, close to traffic hubs or in downtown locations.
      • jon-wood 10y ago
        This is massive in the UK. Ocado run nothing but heavily automated warehouses as their online only, and a lot of the big supermarkets are starting to run similar locations optimised for delivery packing. Somewhat tangentially I've even heard of a couple of restaurant chains opening dark stores which do nothing but fulfil delivery orders.
  • lujim 10y ago
    I kind of question how much additional margin the average person will tolerate though. Will the same mom that spends time clipping coupons (or printing them) be willing to pay what it takes to make this worthwhile for Walmart? That's the demographic you want to entice if you want to make grocery delivery successful, not Johnny Ramen College kid.
• dragonwriter 10y ago
  "Feeling lazy" and deciding not to prepare food is a different problem than not taking ingredients on hand and not wanting to go to the store because of any of a variety of reasons (teething baby, poor air quality day -- especially for asthmatics, or just disliking the in suite experience at the local grocery, etc.) For you maybe there is no difference between having time and desire to prepare food and having willingness to go to the site, but you aren't the whole market.
  • lujim 10y ago
    True, but I feel like food prep and cleanup is a much bigger deal than the actual trip to the store. I've had the teething baby and can tell you the trip to the store was not the hard part. Unless this is remarkably inexpensive I don't think the "making ends meet/clipping coupons" family crowd is going to use this with any regularity.
• eli 10y ago
  Sure and why would people use an app for a ride when they could just hail a cab or drive themselves?
  • lujim 10y ago
    Hailing a cab wasn't a viable or affordable option if you lived in the vast part of the United States prior to Uber. Your options used to be 1) don't go out 2) find a designated driver 3) don't drink, or 4) drink and drive. I've got a ton more options on how to procure food.
    • deleted 10y ago
      [deleted]
    • eli 10y ago
      But couldn't you have made the same "this will never work" argument when Uber launched? Recall it was originally only available in major cities that had taxis you could hail (at least in theory) and was significantly more expensive than a cab. I think grocery and other same-day retail delivery is going to be huge, even if it seems a little weird and unnecessary at first.
      • lujim 10y ago
        I didn't even know about Uber until it was relatively established so I'm not sure how I would have felt about it in the really early days, I probably would have been skeptical. I can honestly say when I did hear about it I thought it was an amazing idea.
• pm215 10y ago
  UK experience suggests there's a decent market for delivered groceries: these stats (http://www.igd.com/Research/Shopper-Insight/Pushing-online-shopping-growth-further/ http://www.igd.com/Research/Shopper-Insight/Pushing-online-s...) from 2015 say that 11% of shoppers used online-shopping-with-delivery for their main shop, and 26% had used it at least once in the past month. So there is a decent demand there willing to pay delivery charges that can sustain a with-human-driver style delivery service.
  • goatforce5 10y ago
    I worked with a guy who used to work at the head office of a Canadian grocery chain. Apparently the grocery shopping habits of UK/European consumers is considerably different than North Americans and so something that works in one market doesn't necessarily translate across the Atlantic. In the UK, my old supermarket had a couple of aisles of prepared chilled meals. Lots of variety, and a lot of it was pretty good quality. You just don't get that in North America, and apparently it's because NA consumers tend to go to the grocery store once per week, where in the UK it's multiple times per week. So over here the convenience meals are frozen and icky. Blurgh! Similarly, I could imagine the economics of delivery would be vastly different. The UK has tightly packed cities with high population density, meaning your delivery vehicles don't have far to go between stops. NA has large spread out suburbs with lots of driving to get anywhere...
    • colmvp 10y ago
      Huh. That might explain why the Canadian online grocery experience is so far behind the UK, let alone the U.S.
    • maxerickson 10y ago
      I imagine the availability of fresh prepared stuff is also somewhat driven by population density. I've certainly seen more fresh chopped vegetables in stores that serve more people.
• bluedino 10y ago
  We have a local place that does your grocery shopping for you but they charge a markup of 20-25%. That seems like a lot at first, but for $40 worth of groceries I'm only spending $10 to not have to drive to and from the store, and walk around for 30 minutes collecting items. Saves me an hour total or 45 minutes on the way home from work.
  • blairanderson 10y ago
    this is exactly why services like blue-apron and instacart are successful. Obviously they'll have growing pains, other humans will NEVER make the same decisions yourself might(shopping for yourself) but they're so incredibly convenient that other annoyances don't really matter.
    • ghaff 10y ago
      Blue Apron is pretty different although, like delivery, it eliminates overhead associated with cooking. It doesn't really work for me but I can understand the attraction for people who don't mind some prep/cooking so long as someone assembles everything they need for a meal and delivers it.
• ams6110 10y ago
  I could see using the service but I drive right past a supermarket to and from work so there's not much in the way of time or travel saved. The local Walmart here experimented with something similar a few years ago, not using Uber but using customers at the store. Shoppers could get store credit in exchange for delivering orders on their way home. They don't do it anymore so it must not have worked well.
• pbhjpbhj 10y ago
  When I feel lazy I go home and cook a meal for the family just like normal rather than spending the whole week's food budget on going to a restaurant. It's common here (a poor part of the UK) for people to take a taxi home from the supermarket. So I can see it could work if all the supermarket's didn't already do delivery as they do here.
• axaxs 10y ago
  Interesting you say that. I was just having a long conversation recently about how grocery is one area I wish could be... innovated in(I do not like the term 'disrupted'). From a store's perspective, items are rather low margin. From a producer's, they are not (as purchased in retail). Outside of the multitude of 'walmart' farmers' stories, I remember rather recently reading of a lady who made salsa, who made cents per jar sold on an item that cost a few dollars to the consumer. This means there is heavy markup at someplace, which I suspect is at the distribution and delivery. It was evident to me when, to make a pizza of high quality with many toppings, it ended up costing me more than even the local chains charged (greatly reducing the 'economy of scale'). There are billionaires in this particular realm, Walton's excluded, see Richard Cohen. This also makes me wonder if then, distributors like C&S, Sysco, or Gordon Food Service would get into the personal delivery game. In the end, it seems rather silly to deliver goods twice.