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Comment by petra | Hacker News Reader

>> why do you think that there can only be one victor here, and that is has to be amazon?

Historically, online businesses have 1/2 winners that "take all". That's assuming the winners could build a warehouse near each city. seems possible.

So the question who will be the one besides Amazon?

From one point of view. Walmart will likely win in the low-cost grocery pickup business. And on top of that they will do deliveries. The way Walmart will choose that delivery is: is it cheaper than delivery costs for Walmart(for chilled deliveries)? and can it scale ? . Does instacart fit ? it seems not.

So it's hard to see how instacart wins.

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groceries are unlike pretty much every other online segment, which is why it has resisted being moved online (until very recently). the model of having a warehouse simply "near" a city is a model amazon has tried for 10+ years without success -- you must have many warehouses within the city to make it work.

i am not entirely clear how you arrived at "Does instacart fit ? it seems not.", so it would be good to understand that. we have spent 5 years with hundreds of engineers building a fulfillment/logistics network just for groceries that any grocer can just leverage off the shelf.

I think he's saying a customer will ask "is Instacart cheaper than Walmart" and the answer is "no", so there isn't a place for Instacart to fit, assuming Amazon owns the high-end side with Whole Foods (although I wouldn't assume Amazon would settle for just that).

Walmart already has grocery warehouses with their stores, so bolting on pickup/delivery to those makes sense. I don't know how much pickup/delivery could potentially negate the need for the store, but I'd assume the pickup/delivery load of a store has huge room for growth before you start questioning why the store needs to be open to the public.

I haven't used their grocery delivery service but their pickup service is well-executed and convenient, in my experience, so I'm assuming they can figure out how to be competent in delivery as well.

right now, whole foods is something like 1 or 2% of the grocery market in the US. we plan to be the partner to the rest of the nation -- my initial question was how on earth you can just assume amazon (by default) owns the rest of the high end market, and, why you think "bolting on delivery" is easy/trivial.

>> why you think "bolting on delivery" is easy/trivial

For someone in the position of Walmart, and with the many startups that doing delivery, it seems realistic.

As for why do i think Amazon will win the high end? really, the biggest reason is that it's Amazon. But yes, that's not a good enough reason, but still, they win an awful lot.

But maybe there's a chance for instacart to win the higher end, especially by offering the largest variety any merchant can offer.

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