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Comment by kanyethegreat | Hacker News Reader

I don't think they're failing because of a lack of competitive advantage. People just don't really like the service. My group of friends used the term "Blue Apron Anxiety" to describe the feeling you get when a new BA box was sitting on your doorstep and you still haven't cooked any of the meals from the last batch. If they did, competitive advantage could've been established (e.g. economies of scale). Besides, companies sometimes succeed with products that don't really afford themselves to competitive advantages (e.g. Facebook or Spotify) until they're big enough to be deeply entrenched.

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Not to mention the anxiety you feel when you open up the packaging and there was just so much waste. Every time I opened up a meal delivery service meal I just felt like I was killing the environment. One time I had a large cardboard box specifically solely to package 10 almonds which were also wrapped in plastic and surrounded in bubble wrap.

> Every time I opened up a meal delivery service meal I just felt like I was killing the environment.

As you well should.

How the fuck have we gotten to the point where chopping up vegetables is a task too onerous for the "I'm too busy in my hustle to bother with this shit" types? These ass backwards Silicon Valley 'products' should be taken behind an alley and burned to the ground.

Coral reefs are dying, mass exctinction is underway, our oceans are deadened and acidic, the little life that remains is full of microplastics and metals, glaciers are receding, entire fucking nations are sinking, fires are blazing larger than ever, antibiotics are no longer effective, heck, even drinkable water is getting scarcer, but fuck it, what we need is yet more asinine packaging to let the fat, overfed, heavily consuming American have yet another morsel of convenience because god forbid he have to get off his electric wheelchair to exercise his muscles and bike to a grocery store to buy some fucking Brocolli.

Fuck it all.

> How the fuck have we gotten to the point where chopping up vegetables is a task too onerous for the "I'm too busy in my hustle to bother with this shit" types?

Most meal kits (definitely Blue Apron) still have you chopping up vegetables; they are taking care of portioning and grouping (shopping and household inventory management), not prepping. So your complaint here is a bit of a non-sequitur.

Not related to Blue Apron: Where I live, you can buy peeled and chopped onions. Have to be put in the fridge and are packed in a plastic bag.

Related to yours: the other day my wife told me she saw mandarin oranges peeled and individually wrapped in plastic. Mandarin oranges come with their own goddamn natural packaging. Why on Earth would you replace it with plastic?

The obvious answer is "to accommodate people with arthritis or other manual dexterity limiting condition."

That's not obvious, as presumably you don't need much more effort to peel the skin off a mandarin orange than you'd need to peel off the plastic wrapper.

I had some "Easy Peeler" mandarins yesterday and, without any arthritis, they were much more effort than removing a plastic wrapper would have been.

I can't even begin to imagine how hard it would be if I had crippling arthritis in my hands.

I wonder how many people buying this do actually have athritis.

I don't know but there were a lot of disabled people praising Whole Foods for their peeled oranges back in 2016 when that whole backlash happened.

Seems unlikely to me. And of course we don't have to presume, but can look at what people with those issues say, and they've been vocal about it whenever there's been a too-successful campaign against these things.

Careful with unintended consequences. Convenient fruits may displace some greener inconvenient fruits, but may also displace some order-of-magnitude worse food items, such as cheeseburgers.

Fruits are incredibly convenient by themselves without extra wrapping, the reason some people prefer cheeseburgers over fruits is not convenience, but because cheeseburgers taste better.

I've said it here before, but these services are a lifesaver for some.

It might seem lazy to someone in full health, but sometimes those small things make all the difference.

There are ways of catering to people with special needs without enabling everyone to collectively destroy the environment.

But without there being a general audience for those things the cost is generally too high.

The example which springs to mind is the pre-peeled fruit a number of years ago which was similarly dismissed for having a harmful environmental impact, but if you've lost motor function in your hands it means you can eat a wider variety of foods.

Just because you don't see the need for something doesn't mean the need isn't there.

I live in New Jersey, and work in New York City. I leave my desk at 4, get home 5:15-5:30, and I like to cook dinner when I can.

I also have a 3-year-old, and keeping on a routine is something I feel that is important, so dinner on the table by 6 is my gold standard that I really really want to have happen as much as I can (allows bedtime routine at 7:30).

I often buy pre-chopped veggies, as long as I trust the chopper (there is a little farm market down the street from me and I see them chopping in the back room). The time it saves is great, easy 5 minutes closer to dinner time than I'd be otherwise, not counting the extra cleanup.

I don't think pre-chopped veggies is the problem, if you are getting them from a farm market presumably you can bring your own reusable containers? It makes complete sense to outsource the parts of the process that can be :)

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