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Ask HN: Will these 15 min grocery apps ever be profitable?
I’m curious what their end game is.
It seems they’re being subsidized and won’t make sense for orders under a certain amount once they try and monetize, (E.g paying $5 to get a $0.45 onion delivered) which isn’t much different than WholeFoods or Peapod.
Could this be a case of VCs rushing in and racing for user acquisition metrics with no real long-term strategy like Clubhouse?Are they assuming total market saturation or economies of scale? What are their economics?
The whole industry seemed to come out of left field and makes no sense to me.
- hotpotamus 5y agohttps://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2019/10/say-goodbye-millennial-urban-lifestyle/599839/ https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2019/10/say-goodby... Here's an Atlantic article about the phenomenon from over 2 years ago now. My take is that rich people have too much money and spend it chasing nonsense and VCs who are happy to take a cut of the money that gets burned up in the process. I felt much the same way about MoviePass while it lasted. I suppose the case you could make is that you could envision autonomous vehicles stocked with inventory as a sort of rolling warehouse on public roads that deliver on demand, but it's hard to see the technology getting there in the near future.
- aliswe 5y agomoney is trickling down though, right?
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- DantesKite 5y ago"Ever" is a very strong word, because I can imagine a few decades from now robots handling every aspect of the grocery delivering process and costing only a few cents. Totally plausible in that world.
- digitcatphd 5y agoSure, but by then theoretically that would apply to all grocery stores, so these startups would then have no advantage at all