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Comment by sdenton4 | Hacker News Reader

Thanks to lockdown, I tried both grocery delivery and food delivery for the first time, and hated both of them. Food delivery I think we've now seen fail in just about every conceivable way (wrong order, missed items, order cancelled by the restaurant after 20 minutes, 404 restaurant no longer exists). And groceries were such a poor experience that we just never tried it a second time (inexplicably tiny selection of things, subject to completely random substitutions (if you allow substitutions) or just missing a bunch of essentials if not).

Dry retail goods are fine for ecommerce, though, just as they've always been...

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Have you been dealing with middlemen?

I've had great experiences so far with food delivery and with grocery curbside pickup. For food delivery, I've either called the restaurant or used the restaurant's website directly to order. This has worked for chain restaurants, but most of my orders have gone to a local establishment which I've just called.

For groceries, I've been buying from a small non-chain establishment: in the morning I send them a Word document with my order on it; they call me to discuss substitutions if necessary and to arrange payment; I pick up my food in the afternoon.

I find it all to be wonderfully pleasant. And my money is going to those who are providing me with food.

Same here. I just show up at (get your pearls ready) Walmart <gasp>, check in on my phone, wait a few minutes and they put stuff in the trunk. The only problem I had was when they substituted (at no cost) many small burger rolls for a package of fewer big ones. I did accept the substitution though so it's on me. I wound up making sliders.

It's basically a more streamlined version of picking up orders in a B2B context. There's just no forklifts trucks or flirting with the gatehouse lady (if you're driving a box truck you may as well act the part).

I tried grocery delivery. Its mostly work pretty well. It has changed the way I meal plan, which is buy a bunch of staples and figure out what goes together afterwards. Yes, you have to be careful about what substitutions you allow, but I have been happy with it.

Also, as time has passed it has gotten a lot better now that supply chains have shifted to the change in demand (or demand has shifted back to the supply chains).

> buy a bunch of staples and figure out what goes together afterwards.

This is unusual?

Lots of us just in time buy from a local grocer (read one you can walk to in 5 minutes or less).

I didn’t realize how much of a quality of life aspect this was for me until the lockdowns. I miss being able to pop over to the shop, see what looks good and make a meal.

I used to pick seven meals I wanted to make for the week and buy the ingredients for just those meals.

What do you mean by food delivery, surely not traditional takeaways? I probably have over 100/year with virtually no issues.

Food delivery = gig workers picking up takeaway for you.

> if you allow substitutions

My parents get substitutions even when they explicitly don't allow it, but they put up with it out of safety/convenience, and because it's almost impossible to resolve it with these companies after the fact. I just make a weekly trip to the store for them to get the few things they actually wanted, and they write off the rest.

I use Uber eats multiple times a week, I'm generally pretty happy with it, and the cost has gone down recently as well.

> and the cost has gone down recently as well.

At whose expense though?

My feeling, though I could be wrong, is that they've restructured fees to rebalance who pays the most. But it's also possible they're taking less profit or paying couriers less.

In my experience (in France) because restaurants could only do delivery, a lot of restaurants rushed to Uber Eat or Delivery to get some revenue. I was already using those services pre-quarantine.

So we got much more diversity (yay!) but a lot of them were not up-to-speed, or selling food that wasn't really meant for delivery (and arrived in pieces).

if you value not having to spend time driving to pick things up then a lot of those fails are tolerable IMO

even a 20% failure rate could be tolerable for people who really value the delivery aspect.

Erm, no they are not; you enter into an agreement or contract with a delivering party, you PAY them to deliver things to your house. If they flunk out or do subpar products they won't get repeat trades.

I don't understand why you think a half-assed service is acceptable. I don't believe I'm being unreasonable. 20% failure rate is unreasonable.

> 20% failure rate is unreasonable

If I didn’t get my food 20% of the time, that would be a problem.

But if a dish is missing, the food isn’t piping hot, it’s less than an hour late or the packaging is a disaster twenty percent of the time, that’s fine. I still saved time.

Are you in the US? Ocado here in the U.K. is great.

We find Ocado a bit mixed…

We shop for a week but often find there are multiple items that have short dates i.e. less than a week, their soft fruits don't seem to last, and need to remember to remove all the other fruit and veg from it's packaging otherwise it gets covered in condensation when it comes out of the cold van.

Also way too much non-recyclable packaging.

Other than that their pretty good, cheaper than Sainsburys, and the advantage of shopping one line is you can see what the final bill is as you go

We used to do a mix of Ocado and our local grocer - Ocado for dry and frozen goods and cleaning. Have switched cleaning to Splosh though, as much lower waste https://www.splosh.com/.

Swiggy in India has worked out nicely for me.

Ocado are the reason I stopped buying food online. Their customer service is absolutely atrocious.

One example: An order I needed to make dinner for some friends that were coming over just didn't turn up one day. I called close to ten times, each time a different excuse including: "I can see it's just around the corner", "I promise it will be there within 15 minutes", "we can't get hold of the driver", "there was a problem at the warehouse", "the driver was in an accident", etc. At about 11:30pm they finally admitted the driver was just behind schedule, the order wasn't coming and it would be delivered the next day. When it came the next day (~4 hours late) it contained no fresh or frozen items as "Ocado don't re-deliver fresh or frozen items". I guess they don't think it's important to inform customers of that fact. So I ended up with a load of cleaning products and some tinned tomatoes.

This was just one of a long list of terrible experiences. I honestly think it's company policy to encourage their staff to lie to customers. Hands down consistently the worst customer service I've ever experienced from any company.

If they're the best we have I think that industry has some space for improvement.

When did you last order with Ocado?

About a year ago.

We have had groceries delivery service available for a few years already, so it worked very well, except the beginning of the lockdown when they were under capacity. It also forced other players to join faster.

The substitutions were so obviously to increase the merchant’s margins or to get you to cancel low margin orders. The economics simply made absolutely no sense. Demand wildly outstripped delivery and picking supply, ie logistics. Even Whole Foods probably substituted at least 1 of every 5 items ordered.

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