Hacker News Reader

Comment by DoingIsLearning | Hacker News Reader

It is misleading to bundle grocery delivery with fast food delivery.

Grocery delivery is done with trucks fully loaded with orders and an optimized route for fuel efficiency.

It is actually much more energy efficient to package 40 ppl grocery orders in _one_ 4.3 tonne 10' truck, and make an efficient delivery route, than to have 40 people drive to their grocery store in an empty 3 tonne vehicle.

I am not sure what the situation in the US is but realistically in Europe if you have a big enough family online grocery shopping is a no-brainer.

I only shop physically for very specific perishables like bread, fruit, cheeses. Have been doing it every since our family grew and our time, mental bandwith, and lower backs decayed.

View on HN

Definitely fruit and veg.

During the pandemic, we have done a lot of pick-up orders. Let's just say that the selections are not always what I would have made.

I don't blame the store workers or anything. Usually even things are mostly fine (e.g., not bruised, over/under ripe, etc). But sometimes ...

That comes down to stock though.

Put it in another way, if I wanted to buy apples of X variety and I got to the supermarket and those apples looked crap I just wouldn't buy them, I would buy some other fruit or come back another day.

However online, if I ordered x and they have in stock then they have to fulfil that order, even if the apples look like crap.

I am not really sure you could improve this unless you had some form of back and forth comms between you and the warehouse.

The crap apples shouldn't be sold. They should be sent back to the apple distributor and converted to apple pie.

I think in Australian supermarkets there is some element of this second-use that occurs in the supermarket itself. Avoids the two extra trips.

hard to know where each individual draws the crap line

Thats what branding is for. A company puts their name and logo on it, and then also sets the quality standards.

Cheap brands might have lower standards than premium brands. The company makes sure the stores uphold the quality standards, and stop selling through stores that hurt their brand.

At Coop in Sweden, I can buy a fruit box or a veg box that is a somewhat random assortment of produce, though there tend to be some constants. This is what we have done. I have rarely bought specific fruits or veg for pick-up orders, though not never.

> I don't blame the store workers or anything. Usually even things are mostly fine (e.g., not bruised, over/under ripe, etc). But sometimes ...

Hmm, apart from the "but sometimes...", your comment did make me realise that this might be a reason why it's more viable: produce that is fine but would get left behind in the supermarket (e.g. curved cucumbers, the last crop of lettuce, ...) would no longer have to be thrown away but actually gets bought.

>I am not sure what the situation in the US is but realistically in Europe if you have a big enough family online grocery shopping is a no-brainer.

If you're in the US, and within 15 minutes of a Costco or other similar wholesale store, I cannot imagine paying someone to do that legwork would be cheap enough to be worth it for anyone who is mobile and has a car. My kids also love going to the grocery store and interacting with people. But mostly, labor is very expensive, and if I am doing grocery shopping for fruits and vegetables and dairy (which I want to pick myself), then the rest of grocery is 100 feet away so I might as well do that too and not pay someone else to do it.

For the "classic" grocery delivery, where you order once every 1-2 weeks to get all ingredients you need, I totally agree.

Recently in larger cities in EU there's been a sudden rise of "10 minutes delivery"-style apps like Gorillas, Flink or Getis. These companies are more like food delivery.

Now the model they are pushing is 10 minute grocery delivery which aligns closer to fast food than what you describe.

Nope, not in London now. https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2021/jun/12/the-ris...

Ok, then indeed hard agree with the parent comment, there is no way this can be sustainable unless you are subsidizing it with VC money.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com