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Comment by Animats | Hacker News Reader

Instacart is a threat to WalMart? That's a surprise. I had no idea Instacart was that big. I think of them as a gig-economy delivery service that delivers only 80% of what you order.

The whole business of sending people to do shopping in retail stores seems a temporary business until the grocery industry gets fulfillment figured out. It's like a throwback to the early days of Internet commerce, when the web site didn't talk to the inventory system, so many orders could not be fulfilled properly.

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Probably the best thing about COVID is now all stores here do curbside pickup. I don't understand why it took COVID to make companies realize that "hey, a large part of your clientele don't want to wander your aisles."

>I don't understand why it took COVID to make companies realize that "hey, a large part of your clientele don't want to wander your aisles."

Because making shoppers wander the aisles leads them to buy more things than they intended to. There's a reason best-selling items are always placed at eye level.

>Because making shoppers wander the aisles leads them to buy more things than they intended to. There's a reason best-selling items are always placed at eye level.

And the dairy or automotive sections are nowhere near the entrance. They want you to impulse buy some cookies or a $5 DVD on your way to get milk or an oil change.

Ehhh I like to peruse the apps for new stuff I've never tried before. It's easier to impulse shop in an app than it is to bounce back and forth between aisles.

For example you might see a novel ingredient in the ethnic food section of the app, go look up a recipe that includes it, add all the rest of the ingredients all without putting on pants.

Not only that, there is real money made in in-store product placement (end caps) etc.

Less foot traffic, less money.

What prevents that from happening in a web-based experience?

Mostly, limited visual field. Screens aren't able to lure you in through peripheral vision

They try. For example Instacart shows you "recommended" items at multiple places in the shopping flow. However I think there is some sort of limit here because it feels more explicit. If I search for something it is obvious when you are putting results that don't match in my way. In the store it is easy not to realize that the things that you want are intentionally spread out.

Funnily enough, that's actually how grocery stores used to operate: people would bring a list of items they wanted to the store, and the employees would go get them. Piggly Wiggly (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Piggly_Wiggly) popularized the concept of self-serve grocery stores that we know today. I recall that people preferred this because they could pick their preferred cuts of meat, or veggies, or what have you.

Grocery stores operate with razor thin margins of 2%. Pickup is more labor intensive and hastily scaled up COVID-19 pickup runs at a -5% profit. It’s better than no sales but is inherently a luxury service in a market with customers who are not willing to pay extra. Even Whole Foods had to find an exit as mainstream and discount grocers started grabbing organic market share.

Yeah, I worked at Meijer when they introduced their curbside pickup. It was a challenge getting that profitable. They had to have extra coolers for meats and other products that needed to be kept cool until the customer arrived.

They ended up just raising prices on all products purchased through Shipt (instacart) or through curbside. Most people don’t notice that a pack of batteries is 5.49 in store versus 5.99 in the app.

Some big ticket items, like Xboxes or other digital items, where customers generally know the price, were not increased. But in general it worked out well and became profitable.

Used to do retail tech work.

Instacart collapses brand identities as consumers don’t care where the food comes from. This is very top of mind of whatever reason for retail/grocery execs.

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