Hacker News Reader

Comment by paulbennett | Hacker News Reader

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?

View on HN

> 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.

>$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.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com