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Comment by biggc | Hacker News Reader

I feel like I'm taking crazy pills. Every supermarket in Montrela offers phone orders and home delivery for a fee of less than $5 if your order is big enough ($50+). If you want to, you can even do your shopping in the store, and pay about two bucks to have them deliver to your house if it was in a few km.

I just checked, and one of the smaller chains (4 stores) has their own online ordering platform.

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San Francisco is an odd place. And so is Silicon Valley and the big brands we all know. Most of what startups there do is to solve local problems of San Frnacisco (and there are MANY!).

Taxis suck? -> Uber Hotels super shit and your rent is super high? -> AirBnB Restaurants don't deliver -> various delivery services Wholefood et al doesn't deliver -> various delivery services No laundry in your $5000 rental apt -> laundry by app

A lot of those problems don't exist in more developed places. (Yet other problems do). But these big startups grow due to it's ecosystem and Marketing/PR focus on the Bay Area.

>Most of what startups there do is to solve local problems of San Francisco (and there are MANY!).

San Francisco must be a paradise on Earth then? I've never been.

I've heard it called (I think on HN!) an assisted living community for people in their 20s - because all those services are subsidised by VC capital too.

Well, specifically they serve the perceived problems of well-paid tech workers in San Francisco, which isn't actually most of the population. San Francisco has its merits but it most certainly isn't paradise on earth.

More like a bubble waiting to messily burst, or in the most extreme, the place we'll fondly remember after the earthquake.

Tech center of the world with a 1970's subway system that sucks in more ways than one (hurts your ears inside and out, dirty, not on time, not many stops, frequent maintenance issues, etc.).

Their revenue numbers must look absolutely insane, even if they're not actually profitable. I spend more money through instacart right now than any other software, and maybe all other software I use, combined.

Not appropriate to count entire cart/shopping spend as Instacart's revenue. Think of that as "GMV". Instacart's revenue is their delivery charges, service charges, and any money the stores pay them / % fees.

See #6 here http://a16z.com/2015/08/21/16-metrics/

Great article, thanks.

Are they counting pass-through as revenue?

None of my grocery stores within the 60 minute range offer delivery. I wish they did. I live outside of a major city, in a pretty wealthy area. There is no instacart, no amazon fresh, etc. Uber doesn't even deliver here. It's pretty lame and the population exists to support even just one of these services.

Aggravates me a lot..which is an understatement.

Where do you live? Does seem surprising...

You'd be surprised. I live 35 miles west of Boston/Cambridge, and there are none of these delivery services. Last time I looked, Uber was available but it looked very thin--not something I could depend on for a morning appointment. All of these offerings decrease greatly in availability once you get beyond the central Metro areas of certain cities.

Of course, I wouldn't use them much anyway. Assuming the thing being delivered is available locally (which is more the issue), hopping in a car and picking it up isn't a big deal.

[ADDED: Well, I can use Peapod (and have when I had an injury) but didn't particularly care for it.]

IIRC Roche Brothers now has a similar delivery service in that area now. I'm not sure if there are others, but I wouldn't be shocked.

I doubt it. Their nearest store is at least as far away as Boston is for me. (Doesn't seem to be a way to actually check without registering on their site.)

I see, and you're right I can't think of any other options in the area. MA is great for a lot of things, but the lower population definitely means it takes a hit for services you'd see in NYC, Chicago or SF.

A lot of that kind of thing is available closer into metro Boston. But I'm out past any real suburbs and the small cities that are closer to me aren't the sort of places where people Uber and get Whole Foods deliveries.

Outside Philly, Upper Makefield. I think we have FreshDirect which some how manages to encourage people just to go the shops themselves due to how terrible their service is.

All my nearby stores offer this, I still use Instacart. It lets me shop from any store, their QC is amazing, and living in a small apartment I need to make 2 or 3 $35 trips (instead of one big $150 trip) and that becomes free on Instacart (saving me close to 5hrs per week of drudgery).

I really don't see that as sustainable for them. The fifteen percent they mention on $35 is not very much to work with. I understand buying market share but all of these services seem to follow the same route, incredible lead in pricing and then trying to find out how to raise it without driving everyone to another solution.

grocery stores usually can pull this off as they tend to have pharmacies they want you to use and other services

The problem with so many of these, what are effectively, personal services going back to the dot-com bubble is that they're effectively luxury goods for most people.

And unless they actually need them for some reason (lack of mobility, don't have a car, etc.) most people don't buy a lot of unsubsidized personal services. They don't have gardeners, lawn care, drivers, etc. Some do but it can be hard to build a business out of just them.

Which part is causing the crazy pills effect?

Webvan existed in 1996.

Dozens of variations of these delivery & order services have existed spanning 20 years in the US, at start-ups and at large companies.

It's about perfecting the concept, deploying fully across the nation at high quality, acquiring access to 300 million people and owning the US market (worth tens of billions in sales in total once it's saturated).

> It's about perfecting the concept...

I think pretty much few of these unicorns are proven not to be profitable, despite exploiting their employees (read low wages, no tips) [0], [1]. What's to make perfect on a business plan already broken?

[0] http://www.recode.net/2017/2/20/14503128/instacart-service-f...

[1] http://www.cbsnews.com/news/travis-kalanick-uber-ceo-apologi...

Also in my neighborhood: Google Express offers home delivery of lots of stuff. Amazon Prime Now offers home delivery of lots of stuff.

But your local stores-that-deliver doesn't argue against Instacart. Isn't it in their interest to outsource that chore to someone instead of paying their own drivers?

I get the sense Google is backing away from Express. Around me you used to be able to pick a delivery window (potentially same day), now you can only pick a day in the future with no time. Makes it virtually unusable if you live in a city and don't have a doorman.

Amazon, on the other hand, I would be worried about id I were instscart.

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