6 ms·

Webvan brings up old memories and I really thought of it as the future. My neighbors tried it a few times and I can remember it showing up. When I asked my pare

by wil421 7y ago

Webvan brings up old memories and I really thought of it as the future. My neighbors tried it a few times and I can remember it showing up. When I asked my parents to do it they thought I was crazy. Pretty sure cost had something to do with it. I’d still fill up a shopping cart just because. Webvan failed but if the gig economy was around it could’ve succeeded for a time. These companies need non-employees to make it viable I believe. Will Uber eats and the like become the next Webvan? Grocery store delivery? Paying someone to shop for you then picking it up? IMHO, robots will not be picking people up and delivering our groceries in the near future. Your business can’t depend on the weather. Gig economies are not good for the gig seekers long term.

sixQuarks 7y ago
I remember a journalist did a story on webvan and how ridiculous it’s biz model was. They ordered a snickers bar, which was delivered by itself. The cost to deliver that snickers bar was multiple times the cost of the product.
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
- pp19dd 7y ago
  Knew a person who worked there at the time and they said the problem no one could solve was optimizing logistics because they couldn't cherry pick their customers. One order could be halfway across town from the next, and they had to fulfill that in a timely manner.
londev 7y ago
Almost every one I know in the UK has their groceries delivered. According to the official stats it’s only 7% of grocery spend though.
- cameronbrown 7y ago
  This is definitely the kind of thing heavily influenced by location. I'm from the north and I don't know anyone who gets them delivered.
  - rjsw 7y ago
    Where do you count as "the north" ? Plenty of delivery vans around in Manchester.
  - pushpop 7y ago
    I think it’s more of an income thing than a location thing. Most supermarkets will have a minimum spend and then there is a delivery charge on top. Both are pretty cheap but if money is tight then that is one easy convenience to go without.
    - twic 7y ago
      I suspect there's also a social proof aspect. If five of your six closest local friends get their shopping delivered, you're very likely to try it yourself. If you don't know anyone who does it, you aren't.
      - pushpop 7y ago
        I would be the outlier in that particular example but I think there is a fair amount in truth in what you said nonetheless.
    - kalleboo 7y ago
      I know people with not great income who use delivery due to working parents and can't afford a car, so ordering delivery from a large supermarket is cheaper and has better range than the walkable corner store alternative, and frees up a ton of time.
      - pushpop 7y ago
        Ironically I find I spend less when shopping online too because I’m less likely to impulse buy stuff. Though I do often break the “don’t go shopping when you’re hungry” rule, which doesn’t help.
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
- gwbas1c 7y ago
  At least in the US, I go to the grocery store because I enjoy going. Because I buy so much online, and I telecommute, it's just my excuse to get out of the house... ... And, honestly, I'd rather buy fresh produce and perishables in person. The rest of things at the grocery store are usually cheaper in person. Anyway, IMO, the real value of online shopping is that you no longer have those 3-hour trips from store to store to find that thing that everyone ran out of, or has poor selection. The grocery store for staples is the last thing online merchants can really replace.
- twic 7y ago
  I always chuckle when threads about shopping delivery come up on HN. It's part of the holy trinity of delivery, instant bank transfers, and the metric system, where Americans line up to explain why none of those things could ever actually work, despite the fact that they are working perfectly well in much of the rest of the world. There's something almost Onionesque about it [1]. [1] https://www.theonion.com/no-way-to-prevent-this-says-only-nation-where-this-r-1835173950 https://www.theonion.com/no-way-to-prevent-this-says-only-na...
- bpye 7y ago
  The UK even has an online only supermarket, Ocado, though they seem to be partnered with Waitrose as they offer a lot of Waitrose branded products.
leetbulb 7y ago
> Will Uber eats and the like become the next Webvan? Grocery store delivery? Paying someone to shop for you then picking it up? Maybe for prepackaged foods, but I hope not fresh foods like meats, veggies, etc. Most stores have a wide variety of quality in the same bin for any given food and I'd rather be the one to choose.
- wil421 7y ago
  I love to cook and wouldn’t trust someone else picking out my groceries. Not to mention these things cost more.
  - MarkyC4 7y ago
    I currently use Instacart (as an Express member). I'd say 10% of orders (I order ~2 times a week) contain an item that wasn't of sufficient quality. Their customer support is great when this happens, always refunding the bad item (though sometimes that's besides the point -- I needed that item for my meal!) The $100 yearly membership fee amortizes to ~$1/order, and the markup on products seems to be ~5-10%. So I'm paying a little extra to avoid going to multiple grocery stores on a weekend/weeknight
napoleond 7y ago
> These companies need non-employees to make it viable I believe. I'm curious about this. Does this mean that, once gig-economy workers factor in all the costs that are normally born by employers (Insurance premiums? Certain taxes? Mileage costs? What else?), that they are effectively making less than minimum wage? If so, why do they do it? If not, what is the intrinsic reason that this work must be done by contractors rather than employees?
- ramy_d 7y ago
  that they are effectively making less than minimum wage? That's the whole point of the gig economy: How to pay people to work without paying them minimum wage by "disrupting labor laws".
  - napoleond 7y ago
    Is that actually true, though? I've seen anecdotal reports from certain Uber drivers or whatnot, but I have not seen data. (It seems counterintuitive that such a huge amount of contractors would continue to choose that work over traditional employment in service jobs if it paid less.)
    - sct202 7y ago
      Uber published a study with 2014 data here that says their drivers make ~$20/hr not including expenses which they estimate at like $3/hr https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B1s08BdVqCgrZWZkV0ZfZnhGUGc/ https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B1s08BdVqCgrZWZkV0ZfZnhGUGc... This MIT study says $8-10 after expenses https://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-way/2018/03/07/591430857/researcher-says-criticism-is-valid-will-revise-study-finding-low-uber-and-lyft-p https://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-way/2018/03/07/591430857... Plus given that drivers could be trying to drive when there's no demand, its very possible for people to earn below minimum wage.
      - Spooky23 7y ago
        That's a long time ago. They've cut the payment substantially since then. https://www.inquirer.com/news/uber-lyft-rideshare-drivers-philadelphia-pay-cut-ipo-public-stock-strike-20190410.html https://www.inquirer.com/news/uber-lyft-rideshare-drivers-ph...
hetoh 7y ago
Maybe Webvan was before its time. Instacart is doing just that and has lots of partnership too e.g. Costco/Sprouts etc. They might just become successful.
pushpop 7y ago
UK supermarkets have offered both a collection service as well as a delivery service for years. It’s great, you do your grocery shopping online and schedule a delivery or collection time and the supermarket does all the hard work for you. And the whole Thing costs a couple of quid. It’s a great convenience.
- wil421 7y ago
  My grocery store will do delivery through Instacart. According to Google Instacart adds $5.99 plus 10% of the order. What does your store charge?
  - twic 7y ago
    The market for delivery has evolved comparable complexity to mobile phone contracts, sadly: https://www.lovefood.com/guides/3444/cheapest-supermarket-online-delivery-deals-asda-tesco-iceland-cost https://www.lovefood.com/guides/3444/cheapest-supermarket-on... So, you can use Waitrose, where delivery is free, but there's a £60 minimum order, and their prices are generally higher than the other supermarkets (Waitrose is the UK's high-end supermarket for moderately posh people [1]). Or you can use solidly middle-class Sainsbury's, where there's a £25 minimum order, delivery costs £1 - £7 depending on the time and day, but it's free for orders over £100. Or something else. Or sign up to a subscription plan which will work out cheaper if you get a lot of deliveries, etc. [1] https://www.buzzfeed.com/floperry/of-the-most-middle-class-things-overheard-at-waitrose https://www.buzzfeed.com/floperry/of-the-most-middle-class-t...
  - pushpop 7y ago
    As I said in my post, I normally pay £2. But the price is variable depending on time of day etc. I can’t recall what the minimum spend is but it’s way below our typical weekly spend anyway.
wpietri 7y ago
The hilarious part to me is how Webvan as deployed represented a cutting of scope. Originally they were going to sell everything. Groceries were the start-small compromise! One valuable lesson here is that being correct but too early is the same thing as being wrong. Webvan vastly overestimated the speed of change. 20 years later and I still get most of my groceries from the corner store. I have friends who do mostly delivery, but that's still far from a perfect experience. Another is that any startup should ask questions like: what do we think we'll learn, and can we learn that for less money? They spent $800 million finding out the answers to things like, How much do people want to buy groceries on line? and What are sustainable economics for grocery delivery? They could have gotten the answers they did for less than 1% of what they spent. Build a web site, rent a few trucks, buy most of your groceries from the nearest grocery store, launch a limited test in your most favorable zip code. They would quickly have learned how viable it was, and the other $792 million could have gone to startups with more of a chance of delivering sustained customer value.
- mikepurvis 7y ago
  There was a grocery delivery startup called Grocera that operated in Waterloo region for a little while a couple years ago (https://www.crunchbase.com/organization/grocera https://www.crunchbase.com/organization/grocera). It's defunct now, but my wife ordered from them a few times, and was pretty sure it was one of the founders who showed up at the door, pulling the order out of the back of their own hatchback. So much value in learning first hand about the experience first hand, both for the customer and the staff person.
  - MarkyC4 7y ago
    > So much value in learning first hand about the experience I couldn't agree more! I'm working for a startup doing alcohol/cannabis delivery. Before there was funding, our founders rode their bikes to do these deliveries (and have still done some deliveries in the past 6 months). There was so many lessons learned from doing our deliveries. One such example: we had a bug where our push notifications told the customer we had arrived, but were actually still pretty far away (GPS math sure is fun :P)
- 7y ago
rongenre 7y ago
I used webvan back in 1999, and it felt... ridiculous? Like they had to be spending a ton of money to bring me basic groceries? But 1999 was like that. What I think they really missed is how much they were in the logistics business rather than the grocery business -- immediately. That's a seriously tough nut to crack and you have to be Amazon or Walmart or (now) Uber to really play in that space.
davidjnelson 7y ago
> Grocery store delivery? Amazon does this already with Whole Foods.

by wil421 7y ago

sixQuarks 7y ago

I remember a journalist did a story on webvan and how ridiculous it’s biz model was. They ordered a snickers bar, which was delivered by itself. The cost to deliver that snickers bar was multiple times the cost of the product.

deleted 7y ago
[deleted]
pp19dd 7y ago
Knew a person who worked there at the time and they said the problem no one could solve was optimizing logistics because they couldn't cherry pick their customers. One order could be halfway across town from the next, and they had to fulfill that in a timely manner.

londev 7y ago

Almost every one I know in the UK has their groceries delivered. According to the official stats it’s only 7% of grocery spend though.

cameronbrown 7y ago
This is definitely the kind of thing heavily influenced by location. I'm from the north and I don't know anyone who gets them delivered.
- rjsw 7y ago
  Where do you count as "the north" ? Plenty of delivery vans around in Manchester.
- pushpop 7y ago
  I think it’s more of an income thing than a location thing. Most supermarkets will have a minimum spend and then there is a delivery charge on top. Both are pretty cheap but if money is tight then that is one easy convenience to go without.
  - twic 7y ago
    I suspect there's also a social proof aspect. If five of your six closest local friends get their shopping delivered, you're very likely to try it yourself. If you don't know anyone who does it, you aren't.
    - pushpop 7y ago
      I would be the outlier in that particular example but I think there is a fair amount in truth in what you said nonetheless.
  - kalleboo 7y ago
    I know people with not great income who use delivery due to working parents and can't afford a car, so ordering delivery from a large supermarket is cheaper and has better range than the walkable corner store alternative, and frees up a ton of time.
    - pushpop 7y ago
      Ironically I find I spend less when shopping online too because I’m less likely to impulse buy stuff. Though I do often break the “don’t go shopping when you’re hungry” rule, which doesn’t help.
deleted 7y ago
[deleted]
gwbas1c 7y ago
At least in the US, I go to the grocery store because I enjoy going. Because I buy so much online, and I telecommute, it's just my excuse to get out of the house... ... And, honestly, I'd rather buy fresh produce and perishables in person. The rest of things at the grocery store are usually cheaper in person. Anyway, IMO, the real value of online shopping is that you no longer have those 3-hour trips from store to store to find that thing that everyone ran out of, or has poor selection. The grocery store for staples is the last thing online merchants can really replace.
twic 7y ago
I always chuckle when threads about shopping delivery come up on HN. It's part of the holy trinity of delivery, instant bank transfers, and the metric system, where Americans line up to explain why none of those things could ever actually work, despite the fact that they are working perfectly well in much of the rest of the world. There's something almost Onionesque about it [1]. [1] https://www.theonion.com/no-way-to-prevent-this-says-only-nation-where-this-r-1835173950 https://www.theonion.com/no-way-to-prevent-this-says-only-na...
bpye 7y ago
The UK even has an online only supermarket, Ocado, though they seem to be partnered with Waitrose as they offer a lot of Waitrose branded products.

leetbulb 7y ago

> Will Uber eats and the like become the next Webvan? Grocery store delivery? Paying someone to shop for you then picking it up? Maybe for prepackaged foods, but I hope not fresh foods like meats, veggies, etc. Most stores have a wide variety of quality in the same bin for any given food and I'd rather be the one to choose.

wil421 7y ago
I love to cook and wouldn’t trust someone else picking out my groceries. Not to mention these things cost more.
- MarkyC4 7y ago
  I currently use Instacart (as an Express member). I'd say 10% of orders (I order ~2 times a week) contain an item that wasn't of sufficient quality. Their customer support is great when this happens, always refunding the bad item (though sometimes that's besides the point -- I needed that item for my meal!) The $100 yearly membership fee amortizes to ~$1/order, and the markup on products seems to be ~5-10%. So I'm paying a little extra to avoid going to multiple grocery stores on a weekend/weeknight

napoleond 7y ago

> These companies need non-employees to make it viable I believe. I'm curious about this. Does this mean that, once gig-economy workers factor in all the costs that are normally born by employers (Insurance premiums? Certain taxes? Mileage costs? What else?), that they are effectively making less than minimum wage? If so, why do they do it? If not, what is the intrinsic reason that this work must be done by contractors rather than employees?

ramy_d 7y ago
that they are effectively making less than minimum wage? That's the whole point of the gig economy: How to pay people to work without paying them minimum wage by "disrupting labor laws".
- napoleond 7y ago
  Is that actually true, though? I've seen anecdotal reports from certain Uber drivers or whatnot, but I have not seen data. (It seems counterintuitive that such a huge amount of contractors would continue to choose that work over traditional employment in service jobs if it paid less.)
  - sct202 7y ago
    Uber published a study with 2014 data here that says their drivers make ~$20/hr not including expenses which they estimate at like $3/hr https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B1s08BdVqCgrZWZkV0ZfZnhGUGc/ https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B1s08BdVqCgrZWZkV0ZfZnhGUGc... This MIT study says $8-10 after expenses https://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-way/2018/03/07/591430857/researcher-says-criticism-is-valid-will-revise-study-finding-low-uber-and-lyft-p https://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-way/2018/03/07/591430857... Plus given that drivers could be trying to drive when there's no demand, its very possible for people to earn below minimum wage.
    - Spooky23 7y ago
      That's a long time ago. They've cut the payment substantially since then. https://www.inquirer.com/news/uber-lyft-rideshare-drivers-philadelphia-pay-cut-ipo-public-stock-strike-20190410.html https://www.inquirer.com/news/uber-lyft-rideshare-drivers-ph...

hetoh 7y ago

Maybe Webvan was before its time. Instacart is doing just that and has lots of partnership too e.g. Costco/Sprouts etc. They might just become successful.

pushpop 7y ago

UK supermarkets have offered both a collection service as well as a delivery service for years. It’s great, you do your grocery shopping online and schedule a delivery or collection time and the supermarket does all the hard work for you. And the whole Thing costs a couple of quid. It’s a great convenience.

wil421 7y ago
My grocery store will do delivery through Instacart. According to Google Instacart adds $5.99 plus 10% of the order. What does your store charge?
- twic 7y ago
  The market for delivery has evolved comparable complexity to mobile phone contracts, sadly: https://www.lovefood.com/guides/3444/cheapest-supermarket-online-delivery-deals-asda-tesco-iceland-cost https://www.lovefood.com/guides/3444/cheapest-supermarket-on... So, you can use Waitrose, where delivery is free, but there's a £60 minimum order, and their prices are generally higher than the other supermarkets (Waitrose is the UK's high-end supermarket for moderately posh people [1]). Or you can use solidly middle-class Sainsbury's, where there's a £25 minimum order, delivery costs £1 - £7 depending on the time and day, but it's free for orders over £100. Or something else. Or sign up to a subscription plan which will work out cheaper if you get a lot of deliveries, etc. [1] https://www.buzzfeed.com/floperry/of-the-most-middle-class-things-overheard-at-waitrose https://www.buzzfeed.com/floperry/of-the-most-middle-class-t...
- pushpop 7y ago
  As I said in my post, I normally pay £2. But the price is variable depending on time of day etc. I can’t recall what the minimum spend is but it’s way below our typical weekly spend anyway.

wpietri 7y ago

The hilarious part to me is how Webvan as deployed represented a cutting of scope. Originally they were going to sell everything. Groceries were the start-small compromise! One valuable lesson here is that being correct but too early is the same thing as being wrong. Webvan vastly overestimated the speed of change. 20 years later and I still get most of my groceries from the corner store. I have friends who do mostly delivery, but that's still far from a perfect experience. Another is that any startup should ask questions like: what do we think we'll learn, and can we learn that for less money? They spent $800 million finding out the answers to things like, How much do people want to buy groceries on line? and What are sustainable economics for grocery delivery? They could have gotten the answers they did for less than 1% of what they spent. Build a web site, rent a few trucks, buy most of your groceries from the nearest grocery store, launch a limited test in your most favorable zip code. They would quickly have learned how viable it was, and the other $792 million could have gone to startups with more of a chance of delivering sustained customer value.

mikepurvis 7y ago
There was a grocery delivery startup called Grocera that operated in Waterloo region for a little while a couple years ago (https://www.crunchbase.com/organization/grocera https://www.crunchbase.com/organization/grocera). It's defunct now, but my wife ordered from them a few times, and was pretty sure it was one of the founders who showed up at the door, pulling the order out of the back of their own hatchback. So much value in learning first hand about the experience first hand, both for the customer and the staff person.
- MarkyC4 7y ago
  > So much value in learning first hand about the experience I couldn't agree more! I'm working for a startup doing alcohol/cannabis delivery. Before there was funding, our founders rode their bikes to do these deliveries (and have still done some deliveries in the past 6 months). There was so many lessons learned from doing our deliveries. One such example: we had a bug where our push notifications told the customer we had arrived, but were actually still pretty far away (GPS math sure is fun :P)
7y ago

rongenre 7y ago

I used webvan back in 1999, and it felt... ridiculous? Like they had to be spending a ton of money to bring me basic groceries? But 1999 was like that. What I think they really missed is how much they were in the logistics business rather than the grocery business -- immediately. That's a seriously tough nut to crack and you have to be Amazon or Walmart or (now) Uber to really play in that space.

davidjnelson 7y ago

> Grocery store delivery? Amazon does this already with Whole Foods.