> I don't get what you mean by "ensure good execution" because it takes so little for grocers to successfully move into a market like Blue Apron's.
It also took little more than a good website to compete with Amazon in the early days, but B&N/Borders/etc. never figured out a way to do it well.
What I want to do is order stuff with as little friction as possible, and have the right items delivered in a way that's convenient.
The chain delivery service we tried involved a few things:
1. A poor site experience. It had 'pantry' functionality, but it was anything but good. Putting together a large order took nearly as much time as doing it in person.
2. Delivery was scheduled during windows, windows that were often either missed, or perhaps worse, beat by many hours. They were often many hours outside the window. We eventually stopped including anything fresh in the order and would pick those up ourselves on days when we were hosting guests. That defeats much of the point.
It was like ordering groceries from the cable company.
3. We were able to select whether we'd want substitutions if something was unavailable. In virtually every order, we would either receive items (we didn't want) when we specified no substitutions, or didn't get substitutions when we wanted them. Often the substituted items were poorly chosen as stand-ins for what was unavailable.
4. It required a young male delivery guy to enter the home to deliver the items to the kitchen. It was a different person nearly every time. This is unacceptable for a number of reasons. Whenever substitution issues happened they seemed so disconnected from the process that it meant it never got better, and recourse took more time than it was worth.
Why a company with billions at its disposal and half a million employees can't get that right is somehow both a mystery, yet also a foregone conclusion.
While I seriously doubt Blue Apron poses much of a threat to the entrenched companies, I think someone else (perhaps Amazon) probably does.