Hacker News Reader

Hacker News

Comment by nawgszy | Hacker News Reader

Full thread

nawgszy

This article feels a bit "no shit", but there are a few interesting numbers in the table there.

* August 2019, 16.1million monthly users, 1.2billion revenue

* March 2020, 39.5million monthly users, 4billion revenue

* June 2020, 45.6million monthly, 7.2billion revenue

Not sure how best to format on here, but this is apparently a high growth thing both before and during covid.

View on HN

The March vs August numbers aren't very meaningful to me without January/February. March was definitely in the thick of it, stay-at-home wise.

I agreed with you at first, but I recall the Bay Area having one of the earliest shutdowns in the US, and that started March 17. While some companies were definitely sounding the WFH alarm about a week prior to that, I think the March -> April jump would've been more incongruent with April -> May jump unless COVID wasn't the only driving factor behind the August -> March growth in the first place.

Anecdotally, I saw a lot more people ordering online in the last two weeks in March than in late April and on. (And, based on the empty shelves then, probably an equivalent increase in in-person stocking up, too.) Remember that stores were running out of stuff before official shutdowns happened, too.

I'm curious what week by week data would look like.

Fair enough, that's a good counterpoint, and I do agree seeing all the data from the source without our limited bucketing would be very interesting.

Be wary of the growth we’ve seen to date. Amazon is charging no delivery fees on Whole Foods orders which is distorting the market for now.

Definitely one of the more rapidly growing parts of the convenience economy. With the much higher average spend and less time dependence, grocery delivery looks much more palatable as an investment and lasting market.

I think it will end up beat by curbside grocery pickup. What is more palatable: a grocery bag assorted with care by grocery store staff who sort things by size and weight when they bag all the time and spend quite a bit of time selecting and arranging the choiciest fruit in the store, carefully lowered into the trunk of your vehicle when you appear in front of the store on your way home, or a grocery bag left on your porch hours ago by someone incentivized to work as fast as humanly possible and pee into bottles in their high interest leased car while they hustle to the next gig?

I'm curious why we have this view that the in-store pickup order worker wouldn't end up just as "optimized" as the general online shopping warehouse worker.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com