Comment by colmvp | Hacker News Reader

Comment by colmvp | Hacker News Reader

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Well I could see Instacart helping (and potentially being acquired by) certain chains who simply don't want to be involved with online ordering and fulfillment. I suppose there's also the added benefit that they can choose from multiple retailers in case certain retailers carry products you can't find at others.

But on the topic of delivery/fulfilment, look at some of our grocers in Canada (Metro, Loblaws, Walmart) who are worth billions of dollars, yet whose only foray into online ordering is for pickup. Wow! Innovation!

A Loblaws near me was applauding itself for setting up the ability for buyers to order products online and pick it up in store, while people in the UK and parts of the US have been able to order groceries online and get it delivered for years. In 2013, Amazon Fresh expanded to SF. Full ordering and fulfilment. While in 2014, Loblaws launched the concept of click and collect, but has not expanded their offering to include delivery.

It's baffling to me that neither Loblaws nor Metro have at least tested online ordering and shipping in downtown Toronto like the way Amazon Fresh expanded into major American cities.

Not only is it baffling to me also, its annoying as well. I came from the UK where I would order a week's shopping and get it delivered Saturday morning. I never had to visit the store and placing an order took maybe 20 minutes.

Now I live in downtown Toronto and I have to walk to the store (no car here) a carry groceries home, which means at best I can purchase a few day's worth of food at a time.

I would so gladly pay a reasonable amount for delivery, and I don't mean these bespoke pick-everything-and-deliver-within-an-hour services - I just want to be able to choose a time, pay maybe $5-$10 and have a week's worth of food delivered. Is that so hard Loblaws?

>$5-$10 and have a week's worth of food delivered. Is that so hard Loblaws?

Yes. $5-$10 isn't a lot to get time critical cargo (spoilable food) that last mile.

But let's look at the relative difficulty...

Apparently it's at a level of difficulty such that Australia and the UK stores have already been doing this for the past 5-10 years...

In Victoria, Canada, Thrifty Foods does this really well, and we don't exactly have high density. The only constraint is a $50 minimum order.

> I would so gladly pay a reasonable amount for delivery, and I don't mean these bespoke pick-everything-and-deliver-within-an-hour services - I just want to be able to choose a time, pay maybe $5-$10 and have a week's worth of food delivered. Is that so hard Loblaws?

It takes time for the labor- maybe 2 hours of time for someone to get your food, bring it to your house, and go back. So that's probably at least $30 worth of their time.

So yeah, $5-$10 is not reasonable. If you're paying that little the labor is being subsidized by something else, or you're exploiting a desperate underpaid worker.

Yet most European supermarket chains manage to offer this, despite our labor laws, minimum wage, and no tipping.

The marginal cost of one delivery is obviously not 2 man-hours, that'd be ridiculous.

> The marginal cost of one delivery is obviously not 2 man-hours, that'd be ridiculous.

Why not? 1 hour to walk around the store and collect everything, 20 minutes to check it out, load the car, drive the the person's house, 10 minutes to walk the groceries to their apartment, wait for them to sign and open the door, 20 minutes to drive back. At least 2 hours of work.

Of course if you run a delivery service in the most idiotic way, it'll cost you a few man-hours per delivery. But we're talking about supermarket chains, i.e. people who know a thing or two about preparing orders and dispatching them efficiently.

The killer feature for Instacart in NYC is that they will deliver Costco to you. Typically at Costco you're buying more stuff than you can carry, so you'd take a car home, and this would cost $20-$30ish [0] plus you'd have to carry your heavy groceries from the car to your apartment. So a lot of times Instacart is actually the cheaper option.

[0] This assumes you're in Instacart's target market, aka rich yuppies who don't live in East Harlem

To me, the dealbreaker is the fact that it's a percentage-rate fee as opposed to a flat-rate fee. I was able to justify spending extra for Google Express as long as I made a large order.

With Instacart, the pricing is extremely blurry with an added-on fee of ~20% or so. I can't justify spending $20 + 20% on groceries. I might as well as just order out every day.

Agree. Maybe I'm not the target market, but it seems like it's charging a lot of money for not a lot of value.

https://np.reddit.com/r/boston/comments/5xj47l/ever_what_ins...

Maybe I'm lucky that I live within walking distance of a grocery store, but I'd be hard pressed to pay anything more than $5 for someone to drive my groceries to me. I could afford to pay for it, but if I kept that mentality my finances would die the death of a thousand papercuts.

Especially considering that with their competitor Peapod, the fee actually gets lower the more you buy.

this can be dangerous because it means they rely on a single other company for their killer app. if instacart gets too big, costco might feel they're losing out on a lot of membership fees or that they could make more money delivering themselves or partnering with Amazon. this could totally freeze out instacart

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