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Comment by TorKlingberg | Hacker News Reader

UK supermarkets are a bit ahead of the curve here. All the large ones have a home delivery service, including Walmart-owned ASDA. It's quite cheap too: £1-6 if you buy £40, for various time slots. They all use their own vehicles and staff, so I suppose Wal-Mart can reduce the risk by using Uber/Lyft. I wonder though, does this mean no active cooling on the way? Can you trust that the ice cream is still frozen when it arrives?

I have found home delivery very useful, especially after having a baby. I don't enjoy going to a supermarket after work on weekdays, but receiving a delivery is easy and means the weekend is free. The main psychological barrier is that it takes surprisingly long to choose groceries online, almost as long as walking around the store. They try to make it easier by suggesting things you usually order, but it's still something you have set aside time for.

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The main psychological barrier is that it takes surprisingly long to choose groceries online, almost as long as walking around the store

I think this is part of why I don't get food delivered; I'm quite close to the store and wandering round the aisles is a good prompt for buying things. Especially as I'm very special-offer-driven.

I've been considering writing a random recipe generator/selector to help with this. "Why not buy $(meat) and $(vegetable), $(cooking_process) it and serve with $(sidedish)?" Add a "That is a terrible idea, computer" button to tweak the Markov parameters a bit and bam, MVP.

(Yes, I know the special offers are something of a con, but I also have a good idea of what the non-offer prices are!)

There are lots of services already like that.... first one I found when googling: http://www.supercook.com/

IBMs Watson has something like you're describing https://www.ibmchefwatson.com/

Its interesting that in the UK, its more environmentally friendly to have your groceries delivered than to drive out and get them yourself because of the efficiency of the specialised delivery vans that have refrigerated racks for 100s of pallet\trays and then do a route in cities\suburbs serving dozens of orders in close proximity.

Some random taxi driver sticking a pallet in their boot (sorry, trunk) seems like a pretty crap and expensive alternative.

Unless they just want back-fill for volume. They can back fill using random Taxi for less than the cost of building / buying a truck that rarely gets used. Sort of like peaking power plants, their fuel costs are extreme. But if you only need them for ~5% of your power ~5% of the time that's 0.25% which is negligible.

Similarly, if you don't know expected volumes a test run without large capital / personnel costs is very reasonable.

It seems like a reasonable way to experiment. The history of online grocery delivery in the US is littered with companies like Webvan that made huge infrastructure investments up-front on the "if you build it they will come" model. This seems like a really sensible way to find out if there is a market for almost zero investment.

Webvan failed because their VCs wanted them to expand to many cities rapidly, and they ended up with 3% market share in 30 cities, instead of a profitable 30% market share in 3 cities.

Webvan is back. Try "http://www.webvan.com/". It's part of Amazon now. Webvan's operations head and some of his team went to Amazon. Amazon management observed that customers liked Webvan, and it would be a viable business if they could get the operating cost down. So the Webvan group was part of the effort to robotize Amazon's operations and build more local warehouses. Expansion is more cautious this time, but profitable.

Part of the issue is that companies like Webvan and Instacart exist. There's not really a whole lot of money in it - supermarkets in the UK manage to charge anywhere between £0 and a whopping £7. The thing is, if you don't provide online shopping as a supermarket, your customers will just use another supermarket's online shop.

The biggest barrier to widespread adoption of grocery delivery in the USA is the lower population density. It's very common in the large cities/metro areas, and has been around for years.

Regarding your comment on choosing groceries online:

My wife is a huge fan of Walmart-To-Go (order online, pull up to a designated station in a parking lot at your convenience, and they bring them out and load them into your vehicle), and now gets the shopping done in minutes, because after you first few orders, the app does a very good job of letting your past orders inform new ones.

The biggest barrier for us has been quality and availability of fresh produce. There are 4 grocery stores very close to us and we usually end up hitting each one over the course of a week to see what's actually worth buying.

There's a fair amount of standard stuff we buy as well, but if we're already in the stores it doesn't take that much additional time to grab it.

I have to wonder if grocery profit margins were higher 50 years ago, when home delivery was as common as episodes of The Voice.

American supermarkets have numerous options for delivery, many of them provided by the same brand, but only Instacart has come close to delivering an experience I can endorse. Their employees are professional and have been taught to provide an easy, pleasant delivery experience.

The first time I tried Amazon Fresh the mailman showed up in the morning before his route with my groceries rolling around in the back of the mail truck. I unloaded them myself, and also had to give back the re-usable bags before he left.

I don't find Instacart to be any better than the other services I've used. Peapod is just as good, if not better.

The difference is the Peapod delivers their own goods while instacart can deliver from several places. AFAIK Peapod doesn't operate in LA.

Population density in the UK is very different from the US.

Only if you assume they need to expand across Alaska or something. There are already several profitable grocery delivery company's out there, they just don't cover the entire US.

And many of them also only cover a certain radius from specific urban centers. For example, I live about an hour outside of Boston and I can get Peapod but not Instacart or Google Express.

What is the ordering experience like? Do you have a set order that comes on a regular basis? Or are they one-off orders, or a mix?

As someone who has used Sainsburys, Asda, Tesco and Ocado. There is much room for improvement in the ordering process. Ocado are the best, but they are expensive.

Sainsburys pulled their dedicated app and you have to use the crappy mobile web.

They remember and pre-load your order for you, but you can modify it freely before making it. I'd agree with the sibling comment though - they're not standout good online experiences, and I haven't tried any of them on mobile.

Mine are always one off orders. I'll log on, choose an hourly timeslot for delivery and then browse down a list of products i've purchased before (both online and instore) and chose which ones I want to be delivered. It takes about 10-15 minutes to do and they will deliver everything right to my door. It ends up being a huge timesaver compared to having to go to and from the supermarket and pick everything out.

I tend to place an order about once every 2-3 weeks, and supplement it with "top up" shops for fresh items (meat, veg etc) in a mini-supermarket on my way home from work every so often.

I feel like a "mini-supermarket" is just a market; the super and mini should cancel each other out. :-)

Heh yeah, it's a bit of a contradictory term, but it's the only 'generic' way to describe it that I know of. Most of them are branded with the store's name with a suffix like 'local', 'express' or 'metro'

The US doesn't really have that class of store for some reason. Even in urban areas, there tend to be either full-fledged grocery stores or "convenience stores" like 7-11 which have minimal fresh food. There are certainly exceptions but they tend to be local one-off markets. AFAIK, there aren't any widespread versions of the express/metro markets like you see in the UK.

There are sort of tiers in the U.S. I would think of something like this for things we have in the Southeast US:

* Convenience Store

* Dollar store (a little more food options at places like Dollar General/Tree/Family Dollar, usually with a small refrigerator section and eggs and milk and juice)

* "Mini" grocery stores, like Piggly Wiggly Express or Dollar General Market

* Stores with mostly food and limited selection like Aldi

* Supermarkets like Kroger and Publix

* Supercenters like Super Walmart and Super Target with full supermarket selection and lots of other stuff

I think "supermarket" originally meant any store where you pick the goods yourself, rather than asking at the counter.

My stores would get a lot more of my business if they had better interfaces. I can pop over to the grocers, buy $200-$300 worth of grocers and be home in about half an hour. Using their website takes just about as long and then I have to wait a few hours for delivery.

> then browse down a list of products i've purchased before (both online and instore) and chose which ones I want to be delivered

That's cool. So they keep a history of everything you've purchased? Do they do that by credit card or do you log in some how when you purchase instore?

Loyalty card, presumably.

You create an account on the site. Why complicate it?

All the stores have loyalty cards which link on and off line shopping.

> The main psychological barrier is that it takes surprisingly long to choose groceries online, almost as long as walking around the store.

Then again, the amount you can order online is a lot larger than what you can carry yourself.

I tend to order from wholesalers online, for amounts that would require a cab and a lot of carrying heavy stuff if I purchased that physically.

> UK supermarkets are a bit ahead of the curve here. All the large ones have a home delivery service

Same in Australia.

Safeway in the US has home delivery from their own trucks.

Yeah and they have for a very long time too. I remember getting Safeway delivered like 10-15 years ago. And that was in a pretty small town too.

The grocery stores I grew up going to in CO had delivery too, I think it was just primarily targeted at the elderly and disabled.

King Soopers (Kroger) has it in Colorado, as do a few local ones...That said, I don't know anyone that uses it.

Yes, and they have refrigeration.

Safeway has a nice approach to scheduling. You can request a 1-hour, 2-hour, or 4-hour delivery window. Shorter windows cost more.

I've had a terrible experience with safeway delivery in redwood city.

Two days ago, they delivered 1/3 of what they were meant to. So, they scheduled a re-delivery for the following day for the remaining items. Again, they forgot two of them.

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