Comment by mancerayder | Hacker News Reader

Comment by mancerayder | Hacker News Reader

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Having tried (extensively) Instacart, Amazon WF and Freshdirect, Freshdirect is my absolute favorite. The fruit and vegetables are in stock, they're either almost ripe or just ripe, and there's a bunch of organic stuff. Instacart is hit or miss, the shoppers miss a third of the items and you feel guilty making them work harder. Also the constant alerts on the app that (50%+) items aren't available and to accept a substitution or a refund is a huge hassle when you're working and get interrupted once every 5 minutes about 15 to 20 times to make a decision. Amazon WF was the worst for me, items unavailable and the worst part is all the fruit and vegetables were so ripe as to be inedible almost immediately. I'm not sure what happened there. Amazon also screwed up because they were letting people put things in carts while no delivery was available, and auto magically removing items.

Back to the topic here. Fresh Direct has the most experience and has the best customer experience, so I really really hope they don't go out of business or get bought by Amazon!

Item availability has been really random at most grocery stores lately. It's something I took for granted most of my life and has been difficult to adjust to. Usually we make meal plans for the week, then go buy what we need. Now I have to go to several stores, assess what meat or produce is available and figure out on the fly what meals we can make out of it (hopefully remembering all of what I bought at the last store).

I can't imagine how hard it is for services like Instacart to handle. Same chain of grocery stores a few miles away from each other often have wildly different items in or out of stock on the same day.

It's one reason I haven't been using delivery services. I only go in once a week or two--earlyish on a weekday. But I pretty much have to plan on the fly (while also having pretty good freezer stock at home).

I do mostly just go into one store. But e.g. today went into a small meat farm store and they had nothing I was looking for. Bought a couple of different things that will be fine.

But TBH I used grocery delivery previously once because of a broken foot. And missing/poorly substituted items were a pain and often led to me having to go to the store personally anyway.

Longtime FreshDirect user. Nothing beats having an inventory management system. And the quality of the produce is fantastic.

In 10 years of using FD, only during coronavirus have items been missing from my order. And not many.

Compare to InstaCart, which has to go the opposite direction: https://tech.instacart.com/predicting-real-time-availability...

Sounds like a nightmare to me. And stores may not want to "plugin" their own systems because at that point, they're just commoditized with already razor thin margins.

The one downside to FreshDirect? It's very expensive. I'm lucky enough to be relatively price insensitive, but recently became a big fan of Trader Joe's. Obviously they're known for being economical, but I'm astounded how much cheaper it is. Even Whole Foods and the like.

Cooking 16 oz of cruciferous veggies and an ~8oz piece of meat is my standard lunch. At FD it's 10+ dollars (depending on the level of prep you want on the veggies). At TJ and grocery stores, even in NY, you can hit sub $5, easy.

Of course, the delivery itself is a huge convenience. But is it a 100% premium? I wonder.

Does FreshDirect have a nice map mode that tracks the driver and does it let the driver contact you and stuff?

When you have to intercept them downstairs because you're in a restricted-entry tower, that's crucial. D:

FD orders come from their warehouses. With Amazon WF, a shopper goes around the store picking your items. The last time I was in a WF almost half of the people in the store were Amazon shoppers. That's why their inventory is not up to date. It's also less safe during this pandemic compared to FD.

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