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Comment by Apocryphon | Hacker News Reader

I wonder how Instacart's business model compares to restaurant/hot food delivery.

The biggest problem with grocery delivery is lack of control. We tried doing in-store pickup but the shopper did not pick a lot of the things we asked for, and the substitutions they made were awful. You're completely at their mercy and they're exhausted and don't want to take the same level of care as you would yourself(I don't blame them).

The grocery store is not designed for the level of efficiency a system like this needs. It's designed to make you walk from one end of the store to the other slowly looking at all the products to gather each individual item on your list. It's great for marketing but terrible for efficiency and for social distancing. As long as the delivery and pickup is done from the same stock the grocery shoppers pick from it'll never be as reliable as just going in yourself.

Or just ordering from the supermarket directly, for those that provide such a service!

But you run into the same issues mostly because Kroger's delivery service is "just as 3rd-party" as Instacart. It's still an employee going through your store, grabbing stuff off the shelves and delivering them to you. There's basically zero first-party advantage.

At least the in-house grocers are more familiar with the layout and product offerings. From a process perspective, couldn't supermarkets process the delivery orders during stocking?

Yeah, this is exactly what it was. We used a Kroger store because they had a much better selection than Safeway and in the end didn't really get what we wanted. At the time I had guessed it was because the 3rd-party picker didn't know where some of the items were and didn't have time to go looking for them.

Having been warned about Instacart I made a point of doing just that, only to have the grocery store run the order through them anyway. The whole experience felt fraudulent, from the bait-and-switch between service providers to the bait-and-switch from carefully chosen sale items to expensive and inappropriate "substitutes". Reportedly at least Instacart proper has a feedback mechanism. With the white labeled service you're out of luck.

Grocery delivery is not the same as grocery shoppers. For me, the two largest local grocery chains are offering grocery delivery and/or pickup, which always bypasses the shelves - IIRC one of them has the shelf-stocking people pack the deliveries before they go onto shelves; the other is packing the deliveries in the logistics centres alongside with the stuff that goes to restock the many smaller stores.

Obviously, having someone go to a store just for your purchase and walk along all the isles to pick stuff up is horrendously inefficient.

> bypasses the shelves

It's obviously inefficient to send someone to a store to grab stuff, but "giant room with products on shelves" is a pretty efficient setup. They can do some of it in the back room, or a warehouse full of pallets, but to a large extent companies end up building "dark stores" that are almost the same as a normal store, but with no customers allowed in.

To a large extent store chains already have them, that's the (few) logistics/distribution centres out of which they supply the (many) stores. The store shelf is essentially just a short-term cache.

Are the preexisting logistics centers designed around picking up single items off the shelves? I would have expected them to be set up around bigger blocks of product.

The preexisting logistics centers are designed to take a pallet of item X and allocate different amounts of it to different boxes each going to a different smallish shop; doing so in an multi-hour cycle (2-3 times a day?) to ensure that every type of product is distributed along these boxes. During this process they also put part of the product not in "delivery truck going to shop A" but to "delivery truck going to home deliveries". It does need some ripping of bigger blocks of procuct and repackaging to bags, but it happens at the same time as they're ripping even bigger blocks of product for supplying stores and shelves.

But the essential difference is the "push vs pull" - instead of one delivery pulling items from everywhere (which is a new process that grocery chains did not have) you have the supply process pushing items to many delivery targets, which is a process that grocery chains already have and have optimized.

If Instacart was able to pivot to full end to end food delivery with their own distribution chain it could have long term viability. Their current model of just having people shop in normal stores is problematic for many reasons, not the least of which because normal stores are BY DESIGN slow and inefficient for picking up a list of items.

Instacart had early advantage because full scale grocery delivery infrastructure was broadly in its infancy but if and when the likes of Amazon, Wal-Mart and others go full scale on their own offerings then structurally it would seem impossible for Instacart to compete with that.

But Walmart and Amazon/Whole Foods are doing the same thing but just having their own pickers in their store. Until my Kroger delivery comes from the warehouse and not the the actual store Instacart will be fine.

Amazon Fresh might be a real competitor but it seems like they're running into the same problems as grocery stores.

> when the likes of Amazon, Wal-Mart and others go full scale on their own offerings then structurally it would seem impossible for Instacart to compete

I agree completely. I signed up to be a shopper with Instacart, and the experience was awful. To get work, there was a 'first come, first serve' queue I had to check at a specific time several times a week. Not great, I thought, but okay, we'll see how it goes.

Well, apparently people had set up bots or something, because all the orders worth taking were scooped up in less than a minute when the appointed time arrived. I couldn't even read the screen fast enough to see what was there before it was gone. I walked away in disgust immediately and never considered working with them again.

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