7 ms·

Three quarters of people in the UK now do at least some online grocery shopping

dalemyers 6y ago
The key difference between the US and the UK here is that all the major supermarkets do their own delivery service. You don't have to rely on third parties to get things delivered.
- merrvk 6y ago
  Where does Ocado lie in all this? Surely if everyone else offers delivery they become redundant?
  - iso1631 6y ago
    Not really, everyone's offered delivery for years. We've done home delivery for about 15 years, at various times using Sainsburys, Asda, Tesco, Ocado and Morisons Ocado have recently changed to use M&S at the backend
    - bosie 6y ago
      > Ocado have recently changed to use M&S at the backend what does this mean? when was this? I still see a lot of Waitrose products at the moment.
      - aphrax 6y ago
        Ocado are switching to M&S (from Waitrose) within the next month or two.
      - evgen 6y ago
        I think the full switch lands at the end of September, but already some of the Waitrose Essentials items are going out of stock a lot faster than they used to; the limited depth of stock for these items has served to remind me which items I purchase regularly that are Waitrose ones and for which I need to see if M&S has a suitable replacement, so far it has been mixed results for me. You can also find some M&S items entering the inventory if you scroll down past your favorites. I am expecting to see a lot more M&S items get pushed as discounted flash sale items at checkout over the next few weeks so that M&S can get some of these replacement items marked as favorites in your account.
    - rcxdude 6y ago
      Ocado manage their own delivery system, they view themselves as a warehouse and delivery technology company at their core. What may change is who's stuff they deliver.
  - cjrp 6y ago
    They were delivering for Waitrose originally, although Waitrose now offer their own direct service and I believe Ocado switched to M&S. Most supermarkets are picking products "by hand" still, e.g. someone goes round the supermarket and fills a trolley with the products that you ordered. Ocado uses more automation, so perhaps their plan is to whitelabel this for supermarkets which want to move away from the manual-picking in store.
    - tonyedgecombe 6y ago
      I think they also deliver for Morrisons, at least judging by the vans coming and going from our local depot.
    - djhworld 6y ago
      This is why I've been an Ocado customer for a long time, the automation + inventory management allows for a much more consistent shopping experience, I've rarely ever gotten substitutes in my order or food that is just on the brink of going out of date. The regular supermarkets don't have that luxury, your shopping order is beholden to whatever is left out in the store and the judgement of the picker. I've worked in supermarkets in the past and the pickers are horribly underpaid.
      - neverminder 6y ago
        Years ago I was using Ocado as well. Substitutes were common, almost in every single order. Then Amazon Fresh came along and I switched to that. Amazon Fresh maintained 100% consistency, I haven't got a single substitute for several years I used them. Ocado, at least back then was lightyears away from the level of stock management that freshly launched Amazon Fresh had. I've been using Ocado lately as well, because Amazon Fresh simply doesn't have any delivery slots left. I have Ocado delivery coming in the nest hour and what do you know - I've been emailed that 2 items will be missing.
  - jarym 6y ago
    They I think are owned by Waitrose and doing fine. They spent a lot of money doing R&D and I read somewhere they tried to license it to grocery stores in France and Germany where the chains are a bit technologically behind the times - no knowledge of how that turned out though
    - Milner08 6y ago
      Don't think they are owned by Waitrose, pretty sure they are independent. They no longer sell Waitrose products and switched to selling M&S instead.
  - rcxdude 6y ago
    I don't know if this has changed recently, but Ocado (and those they've partnered with) used to be the only one actually making a profit on home delivery: because they ship from dedicated fufillment centers instead of sending someone around one of their stores to do the delivery. This efficiency is also why they can claim to have the same carbon footprint as walking to your local supermarket.
    - jon-wood 6y ago
      It appears you're right, which I find somewhat surprising, I'd have though the big supermarkets would have this cracked by now. I know Tesco have a few big fulfilment centres around the place for online delivery now, but an article from the FT[1] indicates that nobody has yet worked out how to make money with the typical model of staff picking orders from a customer facing supermarket. [1] https://www.ft.com/content/b985249c-1ca1-41a8-96b5-0adcc889d57d https://www.ft.com/content/b985249c-1ca1-41a8-96b5-0adcc889d...
    - Jestar342 6y ago
      I don't know about the others but Tesco are building fulfilment centers[0] thus are starting to deliver straight from warehouse instead of store. [0]: https://www.logisticsmanager.com/tesco-invests-in-urban-fulfilment-centres-as-online-sales-double/ https://www.logisticsmanager.com/tesco-invests-in-urban-fulf...
  - bosie 6y ago
    Ocado seems to have a wider/better sortiment, as in, brands I have never seen at a regular supermarket (e.g. Brindisa, H. Forman&Son, daylesford).
  - edh649 6y ago
    Where they always have, as an all online supermarket, betting on the fact that their technology can make them cheaper and with a side hustle of selling their technology and expertise to both other supermarkets and external markets
- jarym 6y ago
  Very true and I love that - the people doing supermarket delivery seem to be way happier than the Deliveroo/JustEat/UberEats drivers. I asked a couple what their hours and stuff are like and they seemed to be very positive about their conditions.
jarym 6y ago
To think British grocery chains had been pushing online services for many years and consumer acceptance was growing at a snails pace until Covid hit. I love using those services especially if it means I can avoided a crowded store on the weekend. But my wife and I are foodies and we also love browsing the aisles to see what’s new and tempting. It’s maybe one reason why packaged food brands are desperate to get onto supermarket shelves - for the exposure. I wonder how many other societal shifts like that we’re going to see?
- Silhouette 6y ago
  But my wife and I are foodies and we also love browsing the aisles to see what’s new and tempting. That is one advantage to going in person. Another is simply that you can check the quality of what you're getting to some extent before you commit to buying it. For example, the "best before" dates on a lot of fruit and veg have been... optimistic, let's say kindly... during the recent hot spell. Shopping online, you just get that somewhat arbitrary indicator. In person, at least you can see that half the fruit in the punnet is looking past its best even though the date is still four days away, and perhaps you'll decide not to buy that fruit today and maybe to get something else instead. The low-paid store workers rushing around with their over-sized trolleys trying to collect half a dozen different customers' orders at once while being monitored for performance are obviously never going to care as much about picking the fresh-looking fruit or the less fatty piece of meat as the customer who's going to be eating those things or serving them to their family.
  - robjan 6y ago
    One of the biggest problems with this is everyone always chooses the newest produce so even if something has plenty of time left it ends up being rejected. The fix is stock rotation but it takes a lot of effort to ensure older produce gets sold first while keeping the shelves full. It probably caused a huge amount of food waste.
    - Silhouette 6y ago
      That is certainly a concern, though I am somewhat lacking in sympathy (with the economic cost to the supermarkets) given that I think this is a problem they have largely brought upon themselves. People buy the newest stock they can get because the older stock on the shelves so often has a pathetic usable lifetime once taken home. When I was a child, we routinely did one family shop per week in my household. A few decades later, I consider myself lucky if vegetables I bought from a supermarket more than one or two days ago are still fit to eat, and in my household we probably average 2-3 large (but obviously not as large) shops per week if we're only using supermarkets. For these among other reasons, we often now prefer to shop locally for fresh food from the specialists nearby when we have enough time to do the rounds. Clearly vegetables haven't radically changed; those I buy from local farm shops and the like still last just fine. But the supermarkets have now implemented such complicated logistics, presumably because it saves them money, that there have been horrible consequences for the quality and longevity of the produce they sell. I don't know enough about the industry to fully understand the motivations behind those complicated logistics, but if it's just a race to the bottom to shave a little off the supply costs and increase the profit margin accordingly, maybe it's time our government stepped in to regulate in the interests of avoiding all of that food waste and perhaps other environmental costs.
LandR 6y ago
I've been doing online grocery shopping since the pandemic started and it's been great. Even once the pandemic is over I'll be sticking to online. I don't have a car so getting to my nearest supermarket was a 2 mile walk. THis was fine going but was a pain walking back 2 miles with lots of shopping, especially in the rain. Now I can just choose what I want in 10 minutes at the computer rather than 90 mins I would lose on a shopping trip.
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
thinkingemote 6y ago
Reasonably low quality article based on small sample poll by a supermarket chain, but I guess it sparks debate.
- iso1631 6y ago
  Annecdotally I haven't seen any more delvieries to my street than pre-covid, however we moved from 2 deliveries a week of about £75 to one of £150 with covid (Ocado guarenteed one weekly delivery) I don't understand why people would want to waste time going to a supermarket. It's like people who go to shops to buy commodity things rather than just buying online.
  - hotcrossbunny 6y ago
    I had this realization about 10 years ago when I had to do a shop in an unfamiliar London supermarket on a Saturday. In that circumstance I'm basically doing their warehousing for them with no knowledge of their layout at the same time as 100s of other people all moving in their own inefficient patterns around the space. This is pretty stupid.
dalore 6y ago
Now if only the butcher did this.
- tonyedgecombe 6y ago
  Our local butcher will deliver. At a price of course.
- jon-wood 6y ago
  Google for your favourite local butcher, they likely do either ad-hoc home delivery or have a full blown e-commerce operation, especially if their a fairly high end butcher.
- tiew9Vii 6y ago
  Haven’t been in the UK for a few years but when I did I used https://www.musclefood.com/ https://www.musclefood.com/. The meat was high quality. Depending how much you spend your local butcher may do delivery to if they have commercial clients such as cafes, restaurants etc.
- chrisseaton 6y ago
  Most of butchers in the villages around me are delivering. Have you called yours to check if they are?
smcleod 6y ago
In Melbourne, Australia right now I think the majority of people are having their supermarkets deliver their groceries each week (we are in level 4 lockdown still), as someone else mentioned and similar to the UK the supermarkets here have their own delivery services - and the drivers seem a good bit happier or at least less stressed than Uber/Deliveroo drivers.
onion2k 6y ago
Waitrose is the most expensive high street supermarket in the UK. As an example, its basic own-store-brand called "Waitrose Essentials" has things like avocados, 'ironing water', and profiteroles. People write articles joking about it[1]. It's customers are very much the wealthy middle-class. I have no doubt that 75% of Waitrose customers do some sort of online grocery shopping, but I have serious doubts that their poll was representative of the whole of the UK. [1] https://www.studentmoneysaver.co.uk/article/things-waitrose-think-are-essential/ https://www.studentmoneysaver.co.uk/article/things-waitrose-...
- mcjiggerlog 6y ago
  It says the numbers are based on a poll, not on their customer data.
- chrisseaton 6y ago
  > 'ironing water' Ironing water is pure water and is needed in order to not destroy your iron in areas with very hard water, which is a lot of the southern UK where Waitrose has most of its customer base. No need for the scare quotes.
  - NullPrefix 6y ago
    Would distilled or boiled water work the same?
    - chrisseaton 6y ago
      It basically is distilled water. Sometimes they add some fragrance. But it isn't the middle-class extravagance the scare quotes are intended to imply. And boiling in a pot or kettle wouldn't help - that would concentrate the minerals you don't want!
  - onion2k 6y ago
    I put it in quotes because 'ironing water' isn't a real thing. It's just distilled water with perfume in. You can use distilled or de-ionised water from a car accessory store instead which costs about 1/20th the price. My iron has a note in the manual suggesting the perfume chemicals are bad for the iron and that I should use plain distilled water instead.
tonyedgecombe 6y ago
The title is misleading (of course). The article states "More than three quarters of people in the UK now do at least some online grocery shopping, according to supermarket chain Waitrose."
niffydroid 6y ago
We use to shop at lidls and Sainsbury's before the pandemic. We'd do the bulk at Lidl and top up at Sainsbury's. When it hit we physically went to Sainsbury's as we could get any slots. Lidls in store response was poor and the store often crowded at choke points. Now that lidl are launching their own cloud services and delivery in the next 2 years we'd probably start using Lidl again
mantap 6y ago
There's still some innovation that can be done in this space. The websites for supermarkets are clunky and the UX could be improved. When I buy things in a supermarket I use my spatial memory. I know the physical position of every item, when I walk through the shop I make a series of tiny decisions about whether I need such and such item. Grocery shopping via a search interface doesn't do it for me. I always end up forgetting something because I don't have the experience of walking through the shop to jog my memory.
- LandR 6y ago
  My supermarket suggests things when I'm about to check out that I buy regularly that aren't in my basket. In a sort of"have you forgotten this?" type thing.
neverminder 6y ago
The whole Corona hysteria caused the number of people to buy their groceries online to explode - government was pushing this message through every channel they had. "Stay at home, shop online, blah blah". Every online grocery shop was overwhelmed and had no delivery slots for weeks/months. Before that I was ordering my weekly groceries from Amazon Fresh for some 7+ years, because I live in central London and I don't have a car. I've been buying my groceries in physical store for many months now. As of 2 days ago Amazon Fresh was still unusable. I tried ordering from them, but I couldn't check out, because they had no available slots. I was put in a "virtual queue" and they sent me an email next morning with 1 hour window to check out. I missed that because I was sleeping. I don't know how long it will take for online grocery shopping services to recover to what they were, if ever.
- LandR 6y ago
  This was a problem for a while in my city too but its better now, either people are using the service less or the supermarket has scaled up how many deliveries they can do. I just created an order now for an 11:00 - 12:00 slot tomorrow.
Brakenshire 6y ago
This was already happening, but I think the pandemic will drive it through. Commodity/cupboard shopping will happen online, and fresh meat, vegetables, fruit, seafood shopping happen locally. Supermarket sites are also hugely tempting for housing redevelopment, that will happen as soon as footfall consistently drops below a threshold.

The key difference between the US and the UK here is that all the major supermarkets do their own delivery service. You don't have to rely on third parties to get things delivered.

merrvk 6y ago
Where does Ocado lie in all this? Surely if everyone else offers delivery they become redundant?
- iso1631 6y ago
  Not really, everyone's offered delivery for years. We've done home delivery for about 15 years, at various times using Sainsburys, Asda, Tesco, Ocado and Morisons Ocado have recently changed to use M&S at the backend
  - bosie 6y ago
    > Ocado have recently changed to use M&S at the backend what does this mean? when was this? I still see a lot of Waitrose products at the moment.
    - aphrax 6y ago
      Ocado are switching to M&S (from Waitrose) within the next month or two.
    - evgen 6y ago
      I think the full switch lands at the end of September, but already some of the Waitrose Essentials items are going out of stock a lot faster than they used to; the limited depth of stock for these items has served to remind me which items I purchase regularly that are Waitrose ones and for which I need to see if M&S has a suitable replacement, so far it has been mixed results for me. You can also find some M&S items entering the inventory if you scroll down past your favorites. I am expecting to see a lot more M&S items get pushed as discounted flash sale items at checkout over the next few weeks so that M&S can get some of these replacement items marked as favorites in your account.
  - rcxdude 6y ago
    Ocado manage their own delivery system, they view themselves as a warehouse and delivery technology company at their core. What may change is who's stuff they deliver.
- cjrp 6y ago
  They were delivering for Waitrose originally, although Waitrose now offer their own direct service and I believe Ocado switched to M&S. Most supermarkets are picking products "by hand" still, e.g. someone goes round the supermarket and fills a trolley with the products that you ordered. Ocado uses more automation, so perhaps their plan is to whitelabel this for supermarkets which want to move away from the manual-picking in store.
  - tonyedgecombe 6y ago
    I think they also deliver for Morrisons, at least judging by the vans coming and going from our local depot.
  - djhworld 6y ago
    This is why I've been an Ocado customer for a long time, the automation + inventory management allows for a much more consistent shopping experience, I've rarely ever gotten substitutes in my order or food that is just on the brink of going out of date. The regular supermarkets don't have that luxury, your shopping order is beholden to whatever is left out in the store and the judgement of the picker. I've worked in supermarkets in the past and the pickers are horribly underpaid.
    - neverminder 6y ago
      Years ago I was using Ocado as well. Substitutes were common, almost in every single order. Then Amazon Fresh came along and I switched to that. Amazon Fresh maintained 100% consistency, I haven't got a single substitute for several years I used them. Ocado, at least back then was lightyears away from the level of stock management that freshly launched Amazon Fresh had. I've been using Ocado lately as well, because Amazon Fresh simply doesn't have any delivery slots left. I have Ocado delivery coming in the nest hour and what do you know - I've been emailed that 2 items will be missing.
- jarym 6y ago
  They I think are owned by Waitrose and doing fine. They spent a lot of money doing R&D and I read somewhere they tried to license it to grocery stores in France and Germany where the chains are a bit technologically behind the times - no knowledge of how that turned out though
  - Milner08 6y ago
    Don't think they are owned by Waitrose, pretty sure they are independent. They no longer sell Waitrose products and switched to selling M&S instead.
- rcxdude 6y ago
  I don't know if this has changed recently, but Ocado (and those they've partnered with) used to be the only one actually making a profit on home delivery: because they ship from dedicated fufillment centers instead of sending someone around one of their stores to do the delivery. This efficiency is also why they can claim to have the same carbon footprint as walking to your local supermarket.
  - jon-wood 6y ago
    It appears you're right, which I find somewhat surprising, I'd have though the big supermarkets would have this cracked by now. I know Tesco have a few big fulfilment centres around the place for online delivery now, but an article from the FT[1] indicates that nobody has yet worked out how to make money with the typical model of staff picking orders from a customer facing supermarket. [1] https://www.ft.com/content/b985249c-1ca1-41a8-96b5-0adcc889d57d https://www.ft.com/content/b985249c-1ca1-41a8-96b5-0adcc889d...
  - Jestar342 6y ago
    I don't know about the others but Tesco are building fulfilment centers[0] thus are starting to deliver straight from warehouse instead of store. [0]: https://www.logisticsmanager.com/tesco-invests-in-urban-fulfilment-centres-as-online-sales-double/ https://www.logisticsmanager.com/tesco-invests-in-urban-fulf...
- bosie 6y ago
  Ocado seems to have a wider/better sortiment, as in, brands I have never seen at a regular supermarket (e.g. Brindisa, H. Forman&Son, daylesford).
- edh649 6y ago
  Where they always have, as an all online supermarket, betting on the fact that their technology can make them cheaper and with a side hustle of selling their technology and expertise to both other supermarkets and external markets
jarym 6y ago
Very true and I love that - the people doing supermarket delivery seem to be way happier than the Deliveroo/JustEat/UberEats drivers. I asked a couple what their hours and stuff are like and they seemed to be very positive about their conditions.

jarym 6y ago

To think British grocery chains had been pushing online services for many years and consumer acceptance was growing at a snails pace until Covid hit. I love using those services especially if it means I can avoided a crowded store on the weekend. But my wife and I are foodies and we also love browsing the aisles to see what’s new and tempting. It’s maybe one reason why packaged food brands are desperate to get onto supermarket shelves - for the exposure. I wonder how many other societal shifts like that we’re going to see?

Silhouette 6y ago
But my wife and I are foodies and we also love browsing the aisles to see what’s new and tempting. That is one advantage to going in person. Another is simply that you can check the quality of what you're getting to some extent before you commit to buying it. For example, the "best before" dates on a lot of fruit and veg have been... optimistic, let's say kindly... during the recent hot spell. Shopping online, you just get that somewhat arbitrary indicator. In person, at least you can see that half the fruit in the punnet is looking past its best even though the date is still four days away, and perhaps you'll decide not to buy that fruit today and maybe to get something else instead. The low-paid store workers rushing around with their over-sized trolleys trying to collect half a dozen different customers' orders at once while being monitored for performance are obviously never going to care as much about picking the fresh-looking fruit or the less fatty piece of meat as the customer who's going to be eating those things or serving them to their family.
- robjan 6y ago
  One of the biggest problems with this is everyone always chooses the newest produce so even if something has plenty of time left it ends up being rejected. The fix is stock rotation but it takes a lot of effort to ensure older produce gets sold first while keeping the shelves full. It probably caused a huge amount of food waste.
  - Silhouette 6y ago
    That is certainly a concern, though I am somewhat lacking in sympathy (with the economic cost to the supermarkets) given that I think this is a problem they have largely brought upon themselves. People buy the newest stock they can get because the older stock on the shelves so often has a pathetic usable lifetime once taken home. When I was a child, we routinely did one family shop per week in my household. A few decades later, I consider myself lucky if vegetables I bought from a supermarket more than one or two days ago are still fit to eat, and in my household we probably average 2-3 large (but obviously not as large) shops per week if we're only using supermarkets. For these among other reasons, we often now prefer to shop locally for fresh food from the specialists nearby when we have enough time to do the rounds. Clearly vegetables haven't radically changed; those I buy from local farm shops and the like still last just fine. But the supermarkets have now implemented such complicated logistics, presumably because it saves them money, that there have been horrible consequences for the quality and longevity of the produce they sell. I don't know enough about the industry to fully understand the motivations behind those complicated logistics, but if it's just a race to the bottom to shave a little off the supply costs and increase the profit margin accordingly, maybe it's time our government stepped in to regulate in the interests of avoiding all of that food waste and perhaps other environmental costs.

LandR 6y ago

I've been doing online grocery shopping since the pandemic started and it's been great. Even once the pandemic is over I'll be sticking to online. I don't have a car so getting to my nearest supermarket was a 2 mile walk. THis was fine going but was a pain walking back 2 miles with lots of shopping, especially in the rain. Now I can just choose what I want in 10 minutes at the computer rather than 90 mins I would lose on a shopping trip.

deleted 6y ago
[deleted]

thinkingemote 6y ago

Reasonably low quality article based on small sample poll by a supermarket chain, but I guess it sparks debate.

iso1631 6y ago
Annecdotally I haven't seen any more delvieries to my street than pre-covid, however we moved from 2 deliveries a week of about £75 to one of £150 with covid (Ocado guarenteed one weekly delivery) I don't understand why people would want to waste time going to a supermarket. It's like people who go to shops to buy commodity things rather than just buying online.
- hotcrossbunny 6y ago
  I had this realization about 10 years ago when I had to do a shop in an unfamiliar London supermarket on a Saturday. In that circumstance I'm basically doing their warehousing for them with no knowledge of their layout at the same time as 100s of other people all moving in their own inefficient patterns around the space. This is pretty stupid.

dalore 6y ago

Now if only the butcher did this.

tonyedgecombe 6y ago
Our local butcher will deliver. At a price of course.
jon-wood 6y ago
Google for your favourite local butcher, they likely do either ad-hoc home delivery or have a full blown e-commerce operation, especially if their a fairly high end butcher.
tiew9Vii 6y ago
Haven’t been in the UK for a few years but when I did I used https://www.musclefood.com/ https://www.musclefood.com/. The meat was high quality. Depending how much you spend your local butcher may do delivery to if they have commercial clients such as cafes, restaurants etc.
chrisseaton 6y ago
Most of butchers in the villages around me are delivering. Have you called yours to check if they are?

smcleod 6y ago

In Melbourne, Australia right now I think the majority of people are having their supermarkets deliver their groceries each week (we are in level 4 lockdown still), as someone else mentioned and similar to the UK the supermarkets here have their own delivery services - and the drivers seem a good bit happier or at least less stressed than Uber/Deliveroo drivers.

onion2k 6y ago

Waitrose is the most expensive high street supermarket in the UK. As an example, its basic own-store-brand called "Waitrose Essentials" has things like avocados, 'ironing water', and profiteroles. People write articles joking about it[1]. It's customers are very much the wealthy middle-class. I have no doubt that 75% of Waitrose customers do some sort of online grocery shopping, but I have serious doubts that their poll was representative of the whole of the UK. [1] https://www.studentmoneysaver.co.uk/article/things-waitrose-think-are-essential/ https://www.studentmoneysaver.co.uk/article/things-waitrose-...

mcjiggerlog 6y ago
It says the numbers are based on a poll, not on their customer data.
chrisseaton 6y ago
> 'ironing water' Ironing water is pure water and is needed in order to not destroy your iron in areas with very hard water, which is a lot of the southern UK where Waitrose has most of its customer base. No need for the scare quotes.
- NullPrefix 6y ago
  Would distilled or boiled water work the same?
  - chrisseaton 6y ago
    It basically is distilled water. Sometimes they add some fragrance. But it isn't the middle-class extravagance the scare quotes are intended to imply. And boiling in a pot or kettle wouldn't help - that would concentrate the minerals you don't want!
- onion2k 6y ago
  I put it in quotes because 'ironing water' isn't a real thing. It's just distilled water with perfume in. You can use distilled or de-ionised water from a car accessory store instead which costs about 1/20th the price. My iron has a note in the manual suggesting the perfume chemicals are bad for the iron and that I should use plain distilled water instead.

tonyedgecombe 6y ago

The title is misleading (of course). The article states "More than three quarters of people in the UK now do at least some online grocery shopping, according to supermarket chain Waitrose."

niffydroid 6y ago

We use to shop at lidls and Sainsbury's before the pandemic. We'd do the bulk at Lidl and top up at Sainsbury's. When it hit we physically went to Sainsbury's as we could get any slots. Lidls in store response was poor and the store often crowded at choke points. Now that lidl are launching their own cloud services and delivery in the next 2 years we'd probably start using Lidl again

mantap 6y ago

There's still some innovation that can be done in this space. The websites for supermarkets are clunky and the UX could be improved. When I buy things in a supermarket I use my spatial memory. I know the physical position of every item, when I walk through the shop I make a series of tiny decisions about whether I need such and such item. Grocery shopping via a search interface doesn't do it for me. I always end up forgetting something because I don't have the experience of walking through the shop to jog my memory.

LandR 6y ago
My supermarket suggests things when I'm about to check out that I buy regularly that aren't in my basket. In a sort of"have you forgotten this?" type thing.

neverminder 6y ago

The whole Corona hysteria caused the number of people to buy their groceries online to explode - government was pushing this message through every channel they had. "Stay at home, shop online, blah blah". Every online grocery shop was overwhelmed and had no delivery slots for weeks/months. Before that I was ordering my weekly groceries from Amazon Fresh for some 7+ years, because I live in central London and I don't have a car. I've been buying my groceries in physical store for many months now. As of 2 days ago Amazon Fresh was still unusable. I tried ordering from them, but I couldn't check out, because they had no available slots. I was put in a "virtual queue" and they sent me an email next morning with 1 hour window to check out. I missed that because I was sleeping. I don't know how long it will take for online grocery shopping services to recover to what they were, if ever.

LandR 6y ago
This was a problem for a while in my city too but its better now, either people are using the service less or the supermarket has scaled up how many deliveries they can do. I just created an order now for an 11:00 - 12:00 slot tomorrow.

Brakenshire 6y ago

This was already happening, but I think the pandemic will drive it through. Commodity/cupboard shopping will happen online, and fresh meat, vegetables, fruit, seafood shopping happen locally. Supermarket sites are also hugely tempting for housing redevelopment, that will happen as soon as footfall consistently drops below a threshold.