Instacart and Amazon-owned Whole Foods are parting ways
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In the SF store where they first rolled it out you could literally see them just set up shelves and fridges upstairs and duplicate Instacart's model. Except for two advantages:
(a) Free 2 hour delivery to Prime members / absolutely no fees apart from tip.
(b) Better inventory data. This is huge. It's directly integrated with WF's logistics backend. It radically lowers the missing item / substitution problem that is the source of the worst outcomes with Instacart.
Having said that, all the other grocers are freaking out about this so there may still be a growth opportunity for Instacart.
Yes, they have to pay the Shoppers a per-item fee, but, for the most part, the price that Insta is paying isn't the price that's listed on the shelf.
Their Whole Foods deal delivered everyday store prices so that's why I didn't list this as a difference. In SF Costco and Safeway have markups but for example Bi-Rite, Rainbow, Smart & Final and Mollie Stone's do not.
I know Instacart used to mark up everything and people hated it. So they've taken to hiding the cost somehow.. Maybe they're asking the smaller stores to take it out of their margins, and they just can't get Safeway & Costco to do it. Maybe they're tricking customers into paying a 10% markup with their "service fee". That fee reportedly does not get passed on to the workers and is optional but most customers probably don't realize this.
Amazon doesn't have as much of a cost problem here because they have the Prime membership fee, plus economies of scale.
Ha! “Optional service fee” sounds like the reverse of “mandatory tip.
More like "free". Amazon preselects $5 tip for the delivery. I don't have to tip the FedEx driver, why should I tip this delivery driver? It's not free if I'm expected to tip.
Pay your workers a living wage and build it into the price.
Servers make 2-3x what kitchen staff do, sometimes even better. Even on the very worst nights in the cheapest restaurants I’ve never seen a server come away with less than kitchen staff. Cash tips are also often underreported.
Good nights can be absolutely fantastic. I’ve earned an entire 40 hour kitchen check in three hours waiting tables.
Kitchen staff wouldn’t mind, managers wouldn’t mind, probably even owners wouldn’t mind so much, but servers would be mass protesting if you eliminated tipping. They want you to raise their employer-paid wage, sure. Affordable health insurance would be great. But they absolutely do not want an end to tipping.
And no, no employer is going to pay servers what they’d make with tips on an average night, and even if they did, kitchen staff would go on strike unless they got it too. And then you’re looking at food prices skyrocketing.
Don't you find it curious how the rest of the world can manage this situation without tipping?
If you don’t want to tip, don’t. Believe me, not everyone tips. I’m not sure what the real problem with it (the wage issue, at least for restaurants, is a red herring$ other than it makes some people who dislike social interactions uncomfortable.
1. It offsets labor cost to the generosity of customers, putting an employee's take-home in the hands of the customer.
2. This creates an interaction with the staff where they have incentive to try obtaining an additional ambiguous amount of money from the customer.
3. Sometimes this means being overly characteristic, other times it means trying upsell you to raise the total amount, effectively raising their tip.
4. Other countries reject tipping because they want their employees giving you 100% service regardless of a tip incentive (because there is none). In America, good tippers are treated better by staff (especially at bars, think stronger drinks), while bad tippers get what they get (not something you want from a food serving establishment: watch the movie Waiting and try telling me foregoing tipping is a good idea).
Tipping is an abomination of a custom that we should reject as a society.
But the customers are not obligated to tip (and some don't), giving them the option of cheaper food, and employees make a much higher average wage than they would otherwise.
There's no way this is a negative.
> 2. This creates an interaction with the staff where they have incentive to try obtaining an additional ambiguous amount of money from the customer.
> 3. Sometimes this means being overly characteristic, other times it means trying upsell you to raise the total amount, effectively raising their tip
Sure. If you have a really high care factor on a particular day you'll try to be nicer and work a little harder than you might otherwise. Most days you really don't put any more effort into it than you would in the kitchen. It's a job. I'm not seeing why this is a problem. And certainly upselling is going to be encouraged by management regardless of whether you get tips!
As an aside, even though establishments (and servers, naturally) encourage it, I don't believe in tipping based on the size of the bill. I tip based on three factors: 1) how many people are in the party b) how long we were there and iii) how much I like the server.
> while bad tippers get what they get (not something you want from a food serving establishment: watch the movie Waiting and try telling me foregoing tipping is a good idea).
In general, watching movies to understand real behavior is not well-advised. If you are a regular, and recognized as such, and known to be a good tipper, you will most likely get better service. If you are a regular and stiff the server, 99% of the time you just get average service and a server complaining behind your back. Nobody, as a rule, messes with your food. I am saying this with not only the confidence of someone who did that kind of work for years, but as someone who now will quite readily stiff a server that I don't think deserves a tip. If you're eating at the kind of place where people would screw with your order because of your tipping, they're going to screw with it for other arbitrary reasons too.
> Tipping is an abomination of a custom that we should reject as a society.
Your "important reasons" seem a little specious. I get the feeling your main reason is you don't like doing it for some personal reason, but you're afraid of the social consequences if you don't. Look, if you don't like it, leave a perfunctory tip or none at all. I paid for most of my degree with cash earned from waiting tables. It's one of the best options available to people in the lower and middle classes who need flexible schedules and have no skills. There are a lot of people who don't tip. It won't hurt anyone's feelings too much, and will certainly generate less eye-rolling than the people who leave religious pamphlets or advertisements as a "tip."
Our inner thread has reached it's max depth, so I'm replying here. We'll probably have to end this conversion because of that, so here's my final response:
> But the customers are not obligated to tip
> If you are a regular and stiff the server, 99% of the time you just get average service and a server complaining behind your back.
> There's no way this is a negative.
So you're telling me if I'm a regular at a spot and I want to strictly pay the required amount for (food+environment+service) and nothing more, then I should accept "average service" and being complained about in the kitchen? That's exactly how you lose regular customers.
> If you have a really high care factor on a particular day you'll try to be nicer and work a little harder than you might otherwise.
Employees should be just as nice and work just as hard as the employer asks them, because that's their job. The people with the money (employers and customers) make the rules, not the worker.
> If you are a regular, and recognized as such, and known to be a good tipper, you will most likely get better service.
This is exactly the behavior we're trying to stop. Service should always be good.
> Nobody, as a rule, messes with your food. If you're eating at the kind of place where people would screw with your order because of your tipping, they're going to screw with it for other arbitrary reasons too.
I know several people who've either been first-hand responsible or been whiteness to others performing gross things to people's food. This is edge-case for sure, but still a reality.
> your main reason is you don't like doing it for some personal reason, but you're afraid of the social consequences if you don't.
My main reasons are:
A) tips are taxed and aren't the "gift" people think they are. This is how the government allows employers to reduce a workers minimum wage down to like, $2.xx or something, and you won't find any worker who is happy about that, only employers and government.
B) it creates a favorites-game between employees and customers, not something I'm interested in as a customer. The only people who like that system are people who get the benefits from it. Those who get screwed, get screwed.
C) This standard doesn't span the entire service industry, and wait staff have no special place in my heart that the rest of the industry doesn't also have.
Also, why do you say "stiff" when referring to someone paying the full and complete amount of their meal and service? To 'stiff' literally means to cheat or steal. As you say, the customer is not obliged in any way to pay more. Using this term is bully tactics, telling people that not paying extra makes them bad in some way.
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I've realized that the problem here simply lies in which perspective we value more. Do we accept that the customer should help pay the wage of the worker with a taxed donation, or do we accept that the customer should have an easy flat price absent from favoritism?
It's like credit cards and mobile payments. Why has India and China embraced mobile payments so much more than the west? Because they never had credit cards! The delta between paying in currency and paying with a mobile phone is vastly greater than the delta of paying with a credit card vs a mobile phone. So the places which had credit cards in the past, mobile payments are not as ubiquitous as in China or India.
The starting point is extremely important.
Certainly not in traditionally tipped industries like restaurant servers where tipping culture is strong. The new jobs that employers are trying to make tipped may not have the same feature, especially those which both already have a service charge and try to push tipping. OTOH, maybe the tip pushing is more successful than I think.
This exactly. When the minimum wage was created in the 30s, tipped workers were exempt if they could amass an identical wage from tips, a system some states still use. This is nothing more than business owners offsetting the cost of labor onto the generosity of customers.
I'm a NYC native, and I tip because I realize that the system is rigged to enable food and entertainment employers to take advantage of there employees. Yea, I don't like it either. But it's here so I just roll with it.
And tipping is offsetting that burden to the customer.
I was seriously confused why our waters werent getting filled up, despite walking 10+ miles before noon. Or why the waiter wasnt coming to our table to take our order. Or why the waiter didn't check on us.
After sharing this story with locals, it seems their expectations are far less for restaurants.
I don't have much of an opinion on how to pay waiters, but Italy did not impress me.
In the countries I've travelled to, I've generally had excellent service, bearing the above in mind.
This is a straw man. Nobody in the US expects this - and in fact, it's rare that this even happens. At most the server will "interrupt" you once once your food arrives to check in, and even that varies by restaurant.
> In many countries, customers expect to be left alone until they signal the wait staff for something
I think you're missing what people are talking about when they talk about "terrible or slow service" in Europe. It's not that they wait for you to signal to them, but that they take so long to appear where you can find them in the first place, and that once you do grab their attention, they still take ages to actually come and serve you. They're not necessarily doing anything important or urgent (chatting idly with their coworkers, wiping down the bar, what have you), and it's eminently clear that they simply don't view providing prompt and effective service to customers as their priority.
I could give countless stories of how slow and inefficient service in Europe tends to be, or even how downright rude servers can be.
For the record, yes, this is a strictly European phenomenon. There are plenty of other places in the world (both where tipping is expected and where it isn't) where this is not an issue.
My experience is that is closer to a (frequently exceeded) minimum in US restaurants offering full table service than a maximum (except for the rare case where the server completely disappears and neither checks nor can be summoned without accosting a busser or some other server, but those are presumably employee failures and not restaurant practice.)
Host seats you
Waiter delivers menus, asks if you want drinks
Waiter returns with drinks, asks if you're ready to order, and if not, comes back 5 min later
Waiter delivers food
Waiter comes back in 5 minutes to make sure it's to your liking
Waiter comes back to ask if you want dessert, and if not, hands you the bill.
If you've taken a long time to eat, they may return once or twice to keep your drinks topped off.
That's it. It's formulaic and quite standard. In my decades of living in various states, I've never had an experience like I see EU folk on here complain about.
Waiter returns with drinks, asks if you're ready to order, and if not, comes back 5 min later
Waiter delivers food
Waiter comes back in 5 minutes to make sure it's to your liking
Waiter comes back to ask if you want dessert, and if not, hands you the bill. >
Which in certain places is precisely too much? What is considered to be minimal and norm by some, is too much by others.
I will ask for Drinks,
I will ask to place orders,
I will ask for desert when I want to,
I will tell you if the food is bad, or more like I will not tell you and leave it on the plate.
Don't come and talk to me with small talks, I am enjoying my time with my guest.
And I will ask for bills
The only thing the waiter have to do is to keep an eye on the table from time to time because he or she should know what the stages of that table is up to.
You see, that is the difference with expectation. Push and Pull. Americans expect the Services to be Pushed to them, while many others expect services only when asked, Pull. ( I wish I could think of a HTTP jokes here )
As to the tipping culture, in some places it is absolutely insulting to tip.
And no, A Glass of water is not a standard part of services before you ask.
I live in the North East, and not only does a typical experience involve frequent table visits, it is an increasingly popular topic when discussing restaurants and sharing or writing reviews. People will raise it before mentioning the food!
GP did.
The worst service I've ever had was in Canada where they do tip, and I was rating that by the North American standards rather than my home country's. I still tipped the standard amount because I disagree with tipping, but he didn't seem incentivised.
It's important to rate experiences by what the region is expecting, not by what you expect at home.
Then you go to Japan, where the service is dramatically better than the US, and you realize that they don't expect tips, either...
It WAS a Michelan-Starred restaurant and our two-person bill was $800 with a $200 tip!
The idea that you should grovel and always defer to your boss because they're kind enough to employ you is something I've only seen from Americans.
Because that's the reality — most of us can be fired at any time for any reason.
Where I am living currently, I think there is more income equality - partly I believe is because of having more or less good wages despite line of work, and you get treated like how someone would normally treat you without being forced upon with the expectation of a tip.
Waiters working for tips leads to a territorial approach to customers and leads to an awkward dynamic where they aren't focused on good service but rather the impression of good service required for the tip.
I'm on the European side of things so I do not want to be approached while eating. I want to flag the waiter whenever I want something and I absolutely hate fake small talk in order to drive the tip up. It feels so artificial and not genuine (and happened often enough in the US).
I do like small talks with waiters that are genuine but having the possibility of a tip kind of destroys that.
To be fair though, waiters in touristy places everywhere suck. So that might also be the issue if you went to a tourist hole instead of a restaurant for locals.
Try Eastern Europe. You are expected to tip, and the service is usually atrociously slow (and not necessarily good in any other way either). Bad service culture is bad service culture. Where I live waiters are expected to perform their jobs properly just like everyone else.
Unlike the US, waiters don't bug you every 30 seconds, and I consider that a feature. You actually have to ask for things you want, and you signal to a waiter when you want something. Unless you found an exceptionally shitty restaurant, they'll almost always come right over.
So, I guess its time for an episode of “Dragonwriter Ruins Adam Ruins Everything”.
Americans imported the practice of tipping from Europe just after the civil war (some accounts say as an excuse for restaurant owners not to pay newly-freed blacks working as servers, but that's less than clear, though where such workers were common, it was certainly leveraged for that purpose), and there was criticism of the new but rapidly-spreading practice as unamerican and pro-aristocratic in the late 19th Century, before prohibition.
Heck, here's a pre-Prohibition (1916) book about the practice of tipping in America, which even recounts past legislative efforts to stop it:
http://www.gutenberg.org/files/33170/33170-h/33170-h.htm
So, no, it didn't start in response to Prohibition.
all while making the client be the jerk.
Oddly, imported fairly late in American history from Europe.
Where did you get that idea?
Just a quick glance at the Wiki article on tipping shows that tipping shows up in plenty of places outside of America.
If I was in their shoes I would be pissed of with my employer for making "beg" the customers for getting my salary.
Imagine if as a software engineer I was told I would be paid half of what I am getting paid now, and for the other half I would have to go and ask for a "tip" from the end users. I would be absolutely furious.
This person/role looks like someone deserving of a tip ->
Tipping is stupid, do it like Europe. ->
Service in Europe sucks. ->
That's just a different kind of service/What about Japan? ->
You can't compare, that's a different culture.
It makes perfect sense when you view it in the broader theme of HN loving to demonstrate the "superiority" of European culture, oftentimes taking inconsistent stances on different issues in order to maintain that position.
I don't spend money on any Amazon products or services at all these days, and if it was possible to spend negative money, I would.
Edit: forgot about AWS. I do spend money on Amazon stuff. Not much on my personal account, but some for clients.
1. Reliable delivery time schedules available — usually today — or worst case tomorrow.
2. Service of multiple stores, so that we can get things from them we couldn’t get from Whole Foods.
One thing I dislike about InstaCart is when we order things like a half-gallon of refrigerated almond milk, and they instead give us the tetrapack quart of unrefrigerated almond milk. I specifically ordered the particular product and size I wanted, and I know the store has it in stock. So, why the fuck do you seem to think it’s okay to make random stupid substitutions like this?!?
I do appreciate the Whole Foods has a delivery service, and I trust that their pickers will do a better job of actually giving me what I ordered. But if I order it today, then I want it delivered today or tomorrow, and in a reasonable time window on that day. And don’t just leave the stuff on my front porch, like you do with packages.
They're also devaluing it with "this item is Prime, but may take 3-5 days to arrive" and their new in-house delivery, which has resulted in late packages (previously a very rare experience) for me three times in the last month.
I've been an Amazon customer since 1999, Prime since its debut, and this is the first year I've been questioning whether to renew or not.
Amazons point of view seems to be that the products aren’t in stock, so when they do come in stock will be delivered next day, but as a customer I don’t care about stock levels or when it ships, it’s only the delivery date that matters.
I only really care about Prime over Christmas, when I could just shop in stores anyway, some will price match Amazon if necessary, and Amazon is no longer cheap anyway. I do care about Prime at work, but we have Amazon for Businesses for that.
I suspect I’ll let me Prime subscription lapse.
Then, there was a scheduled tissue package delivery that was “lost” by OnTrak. Amazon doesn’t automate the refund, you have to ask. Happened to be at Target and noticed that an 8 pack of 160 tissues each cost $12. I looked up amazon’s and it was $17 when bought, but all of a sudden it was now $13 — also only 120 tissues each box. Why the shadiness? It’s great that you have pricing power, but I wouldn’t want to do business with a coffee shop where I walk in and the barista says, “Bob’s here! Jack up the price!” Amazon feels like some legal version of Wolf of Wallstreet.
Anyway, it’s all just anecdotal. At the end of the day I just don’t trust them.
Edit: I’ve been off Prime 2 months and don’t miss it.
I heard that there may have been some disruptions in service due to the tornado hitting an Amazon warehouse in Baltimore, but never in my contact with customer service was this mentioned.
https://www.reddit.com/r/washingtondc/comments/9xebhs/any_up...
Presumably, Amazon will begin private labeling food products, which will put the company in direct line of choosing which farming practices to promote, what diets get discounted and other interesting capabilities. I want to believe this power will be used for good--such as Apple's stance toward Privacy. But benevolence can wax and wane.
I haven't heard Bezos talk about the importance of human health and the food chain, but I haven't gone looking for that yet either.
To me the delivery service via prime is still amazing. It does matter that products arrive within two days because I often put them into service the moment they are delivered.
It matters to me that the product catalog on Amazon is so expansive and has been combed over by previous buyers. The review system is not perfect, but largely I am happy with highly rated, well sold merchandise routed through Amazon's marketplace.
I also have been on the selling side of Prime and while it is expensive for sellers, it is an incredible to be able to address potential buyers using Prime with the branding and consistent experience of Amazon all over it. I'm able to sell unusual things with no reviews.
Regarding the issues you've had with that tissue delivery, I also had an issue once with a falsely advertised sizing of a ducting tube I needed for a swamp cooler a couple years back. I had to really get through to customer service to show that the product sold was not legit. They did take action on the seller after I spent the time.
That said, that was one out of many hundreds of product purchase experiences where I felt wronged and Amazon was involved.
I think we're still just getting started with the value prop of Amazon Prime.
My mum was mad at me for paying for 1 day shipping (eg Prime Delivery - 20€ in Spain - crazy cheap) because "You know that this won't work in Spain!!"
- the price raise got up over my utilization for shipping and I don't use the ancillary benefits more than the occasional prime video usage.
- the Amazon self shipping is horrendous. Lies about deliveries, much higher level of damage on boxes & crazy driver experiences made it so that every time one of those got selected I had a bad customer service experience. With non-prime delivery I can choose, with Prime it was up to some algo.
This was a key factor for us getting rid of Prime as well. Kept waiting for their service to improve or at least let me only have packages shipped via major carriers. Unfortunately, neither option was available.
But Prime Now in particular has been extremely useful, especially for multi-day trips to different cities, where I can save myself a trip to a grocery store or drug store to get supplies.
Also: Prime Video is pretty solid! It's how you get to watch Patriot!
I take it you don't go to Costco or Sam's Club?
Every large company can produce at least some anecdotes like that, but with Amazon it's much more of a pattern, part of their identity.
Amazon Fresh: This was their pre-acquisition play and has a lot of items not sourced from Whole Foods, and some items that are, but you won't find items like Whole Foods store made sandwiches.
Prime Now - Amazon: This is more like extremely fast(1 to 2 hours) shipping for a very limited set of Amazon.com items. Has a few fresh grocery items but the range is quite limited.
Prime Now - Whole Foods: You can only order items that are present at a central Whole Foods location. Directly competes with Instacart
They are differentiating themselves from Postmates in this respect. Instacart's positioning is as a trusted partner who won't try to compete with a grocer and eat away at their most profitable categories.
And while PrimeNow has been steadily catching up to Instacart, Instacart is still significantly better in many ways.
I went to one in California (just North of Monterey as I recall) and it seemed nice enough too. I live in Canada though, so maybe in the rest of the US it's not so great.
I now avoid Whole Foods and go towards more speciality stores or direct competitors like Erewhon.
I noticed this as well, and stopped shopping at Whole Foods. Then I went back in this week to pick up a package at one of the Amazon lockers, and it looks like Amazon's getting its act together.
No more empty shelves. No more disorganized aisles. No more confused staff. It seemed like the Whole Foods of old, except that for some reason there was a rack selling yoga pants by the oranges.
It puzzled me and I stood there trying to figure out if the placement was deliberate, or accidental. Then a woman came up and took a pair. So, I guess it works, I just don't understand it.
https://www.businessinsider.com/whole-foods-employees-reveal...
That totally seems like the Whole Foods of old to me.