I'd love: order today and receive tomorrow grocery delivery. It actually seems sustainable.
The largest British supermarket, Tesco, launched this in 1997. At the time, you could get the catalogue on CD-ROM as well as over the internet.
You book a time slot within the next few days (delivery within a 4 hour period costs less than within a 1-2 hour period; popular times cost more too). You order, they deliver it. The cost is £2-7.
I didn't use it until the pandemic kicked off, and then I only started using it as a way to avoid the long queues outside supermarkets. And it was a revelation. I can now select everything I want to buy over the course of a few hours to a few days, and then go and collect at the time I picked. I rarely forget anything, as I can just add it to the order as I remember it. And from arrival to departure is normally no more than 10 minutes, can be ridiculously short if you pick the right timeslot, or can be up to 30 minutes if busy - that's still faster than parking, going into the store, wandering around, forgetting things, checking out and loading the car.
The downside to it is if an item isn't available, you may get some weird replacements or just don't get the item at all. But that's not entirely different to if you went inside anyway.
In all seriousness, if Amazon can get a delivery across the country and out for delivery within 6 hours, supermarkets should be able to select your order, pack it and make it available to collect from the store in less time.
Today (Friday) The earliest slot at Ocado (A big established grocery delivery service / Online supermarket with own robot warehouses etc, in the UK) will give me is Sunday morning. I do not know if this is due to cut-off times or slot availability but it is moot.
I'm not worried, I plan these orders weeks in advance (and you can add or remove until the night before).
Other smaller services (e.g. Deliveroo, weezy, gorillas) will come much faster, but they typically just collect and cover the last mile. This seems to be a growth area lately, two of those companies are new.
They can do that because, like Tesco, they have supermarkets nearby so it's 'just' a question of getting someone to pick your stuff from the aisles and someone else to drive to you (funnily most Morrissons/Amazon delivery people drive very fancy cars in my area, I have had big Mercedes and BMNWs, maybe private hire taxis filling time).
I don't think Ocado has a dense enough network of local warehouses.
yes, AFAIK, Ocado relies on a few large highly automated warehouses. (1)
The main issue seems to be that the level of automation is so high that a fire is not noticed soon enough. This has happened twice. (2)
1) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ssZ_8cqfBlE
I am interested in a deliveroo/just-eat style grocery shopping solution though. If the store can pick and pack your order in 3 hours and put it at the front of the store for collection by a group of drivers that are constantly in rotation, how is that any different from collecting my takeaway and driving it to my house? It really isn't, but it's also not an urgent operation that needs such a quick turn around time IMO. I'm sure others will pay for the convenience, but I'm personally happy waiting 12 hours and collecting it myself so long as I don't have to step inside the store.
AFAIK, Deliveroo do this already. (1) I've never had cause to try it though.
JustEat might be less inclined to do that as they have traditionally relied more on the individual restaurants' fleet of drivers (e.g. owner's cousin on a moped) rather than running their own fleet.
I actually did this this afternoon - realised I was running low on groceries and needed some cleaning supplies - too heavy for me to carry all at once.
So, ordered around 5pm, and I could've had it by about 8-10pm, or in a wide range of time-slots tomorrow. I picked tomorrow afternoon.