Grocery delivery “dark stores” in Amsterdam | Hacker News Reader

Grocery delivery “dark stores” in Amsterdam

arstechnica.com

95 pointstzs141 comments

There's a crackdown in Utrecht as well: https://www.duic.nl/algemeen/utrecht-legt-flitsbezorgers-aan... (Dutch)

It does feel magic to order groceries and have them at your doorstep in 10 minutes (literally). But it's rarely useful.

> It does feel magic to order groceries and have them at your doorstep in 10 minutes (literally). But it's rarely useful.

Please speak for yourself. It might not make much of a difference for you or perhaps many people, but a lot of people like me also find it to be highly convenient. When I'm tired and out of time instead of ordering an unhealthy meal from $FOODDELIVERYAPP$ I can (and very frequently do) buy something relatively healthier from such a site. Of course, the negatives need to be countered too, but their high popularity does indicate I'm unsurprisingly not alone.

> When I'm tired and out of time

Without wanting to pass judgement but as someone who experienced burnout in past positions, if you don't have the time or energy to do some form of weekly shopping (even if online) and cook some food, it feels to me that the solution is that you need to work less and rest more, rather than rely on 10 min delivery because you're mentally drained to do anything else.

Not just work - there is real life too. Try an 8 hour day book-ended by several hours of childcare. You start at 6am then it is go-go-go with kids-work-kids until 8-9pm. There is not time to then fit in a grocery shop (plus are you going to leave kids alone in the house asleep while you hit the shops?) then cooking.

Does 10-minute-delivery offer value over next-day delivery in that situation though?

Everybody else seems to manage it...

Yep - thanks to services like these. Just telling people "not to burnout at work!" or "take time for yourself!" is shortsighted as it is not just work that causes burnout, but lots of people have responsibilities as well as their work life. You name it - single parents, carer responsibilities, multiple-jobs, etc these are not things that can just be opted-out of to get some "me time" to avoid burnout.

> the solution is that you need to work less and rest more, rather than rely on 10 min delivery because you're mentally drained

That is presumably the goal of everyone in such a situation. In the meantime, it can help them get through it (I'm thinking of having a newborn here in particular, but there are also various other stressing times in an average life), though it makes me wonder if this inadvertently/indirectly supports this state of being because there is less incentive to change it back to something more healthy.

Edit: For my future reference, this comment is nonconstructive how? (Sometimes I wonder what the effect would be of showing the downvote button only after a comment has any replies at all, anything that's bad enough not to engage with should be flagged after all, but then it's very hard to measure objectively if that makes people get better feedback and use it for the better or not.)

> Without wanting to pass judgement but as someone who experienced burnout in past positions, if you don't have the time or energy to do some form of weekly shopping (even if online) and cook some food, it feels to me that the solution is that you need to work less and rest more, rather than rely on 10 min delivery because you're mentally drained to do anything else.

That escalated from "I like online shopping with fast deliveries" to a needlessly antagonistic and judgemental "you are living your life totally wrong".

I love ordering stuff online and barely having to wait any time at all between clicking a button and getting it on my door step. I love how everyday shopping ceased to be a logistics problem. It's simply not possible to argue against the benefits to your everyday life of having the closest there ever was to a star trek replicator at the press of a button.

Oh for sure I need to get my life in order (I'm still a student albeit at a masters level), though I think a am pending a diagnosis of a medical condition that affects energy and motivation a lot :)

This can break down with roommates/partners. You may be wanting to prepare a meal only to find out something you knew you had plenty of is suddenly wiped out. Having a quick delivery service may be a great alternative to someone who is pinched for time and would rather not order out something unhealthy.

> Please speak for yourself.

Why the attitude? It's disingenuous to infer they were stating anything other than their opinion.

I do not wish to come across as brutish (though I think you are right and I apologize for any perceived rudeness). OP made a statement along the lines of "These stores are useless". I could of course say that he is wrong or a liar but what I wanted to convey was that his experience was only an experience and not an absolute fact.

> But it's rarely useful.

This is a judgement, dismissing an idea as ‘not useful’.

I can't imagine buying produce without actually seeing it.

(disclaimer, I work for an online grocer)

It can actually be better buying online. For a normal grocery store the apples first have to go to some distributor on big pallets and wait there. Then some of the apples are sent with other goods to a grocery store with the next delivery. There they will lay up to a week in non-ideal conditions with multiple people touching them.

Online, they can be distributed almost instantly when they arrive to the customer, and in the meantime they are stored perfectly. Also less waste, since one doesn't have to ship excessive amounts that won't be sold to all the small stores, to avoid any store running out.

This doesn't apply to these smaller darkstores/instant deliveries, though, as they are basically small grocery shops with the same negatives of inefficient distribution.

(We order our food online at a conventional grocery store every week but no 10 minute delivery.)

You cannot touch or smell the food before you buy it. You cannot pick your own based on that, or date (it has to be OK for 1 day after delivery day according to their own rules). But anything they don't deliver, anything which was rotten or otherwise over date we just mark as such, and get our money back. And sometimes we get extra stuff we did not order, which we then just share with our neighbors at times (one of our neighbors are meat eaters not into veggie stuff and we are more or less the opposite).

I think this dark store 10 min delivery stuff makes sense if you got a very busy or limited life. Double parent full time job, new born, covid quarantine. That kind of stuff. I suppose its expensive though. That said, I believe its very valuable to respect your neighbors as much as reasonable (e.g. newborns cry, sorry! -- been there). That includes businesses in citizen zoning. Maybe it should only be legal if a real person lives there?

There's also good reasons I don't live in Amsterdam but near it. This noise stuff is one of 'em. Amsterdam is too crowdy and expensive. I am within 30 minutes in Amsterdam Central Station with public transport (not that I go given covid...)

Very often the food is a factory-made package (think yogurt/milk carton rather than a broccoli), so there's absolutely no difference in that case. Personally I never buy vegetables like this.

Why? You see it when it comes to your house. If it doesn't look good, you throw it away and don't order from them anymore. It's the exact same as delivery food or just eating in a restaurant, for that matter.

I do not really need an explanation. I just do it this way and have no intention of changing it.

I’ve used produce delivery services before and rarely have I received a quality that isn’t decent. These people don’t benefit by providing poor service, don’t benefit by providing poor produce.

OP talked about usefulness, you talk about convenience. The two are different.

> Of course, the negatives need to be countered too, but their high popularity does indicate I'm unsurprisingly not alone.

Popularity and demand is behind, among others, deforestation and global warming. What people want and what we can have is not always the same. I don't know if that is the case here, I am simply stating that popularity alone is not a great indicator.

The people profiting of it (like you) are usually distinct from those suffering from it. If you didn't sleep because of the noise of the thing you are using you would think twice. Typical NIMBY problems.

It's the same with the stupid electric scooters and bikes which get dumped all over the place and clutter the streets, but those streets are usually not where those people live who use them.

At the same time, I'd much rather have electric transportation devices strewn across the street, than cars (especially the smoking kind) on the street rushing by all day long as they currently are. The number of accidents with these 1000kg blocks of aluminium (more if it's electric) or their energy needs for individual whims... we're going to be 8 billion people soon, smaller individual transport is not a bad thing. If something needs to be done about the placement, well, we have plenty of space over if we could convert even just 50% of the roads to something other than broad slabs of obstruction-free flat space.

(Edit: I'm not the downvoter. I don't agree but that doesn't make it a nonuseful perspective.)

Edit#2: Observing the votes on this comment, presumably from car lovers/haters, is quite interesting. Not sure it's a good sign if I wrote engaging but not generally agreeable content.

If those things would be operated like bikes/scooters people own themselves sure as that usually means some form of restraint. The problem is that these are not and are put in places where the do not belong like in front of doors or the middle of the curb blocking the path for everyone. People don't care and the businesses use public space like it's their own parking space to the detriment of others and there is little to no penalty for abuse.

That is a general problem with the ride sharing with small transportation as well as with these stores: As long as you only reap the benefits it's less likely to see the problems associated and felt by others.

> People don't care and the businesses use public space like it's their own parking space to the detriment of others

That's what we have laws for. Right now they're insufficient because the phenomenon is new and not widespread enough to urgently overhaul things for.

Just because, right now, there are problems and some people exploit the legal situation, that doesn't mean this is how it will always need to be if we are to keep small electric personal transportation devices as a concept.

Except that these app-rental bicycles, mopeds, and scooters don't actually replace cars. They reportedly replace use of public transport, privately owned bicycles, and just walking. They appear to be a net-negative to society in their current incarnation.

Cars are way too dominant, even here in bicycle-friendly Netherlands, but these app-rental things don't change anything on that front.

> They reportedly replace use of public transport

Because most people still use a car for anything further than a few streets away, presumably. I'm not going to electric-scooter my way from Roermond/Weert to Eindhoven every day but I know a lot of people that drive or train-ride that distance daily (pre-pandemic).

Can't it be considered public transport as well if they're owned by a transportation company, to be used by the public, and not an individual? Right now it'll fall outside of laws that require things like accessibility for sure, but that's bound to change if this takes over as a better alternative to crowded buses.

If you have a link and/or some keywords I'd also be curious to read your source material btw!

> Can't it be considered public transport as well if they're owned by a transportation company, to be used by the public, and not an individual?

Sure. But then you would have something that is actively managed and planned by the local municipal government (implemented by a commercial or semi-governmental public transport company). It wouldn't look like the current mess where coverage is decided exclusively on the basis of profitability, multiple companies battling for dominance in the same area, and externalities such as misuse of public space left completely unaddressed (because not technically illegal).

A proper solution that could be considered part of public transport would have rentable (e-)bicycles with fixed terminals to retrieve and return from/to. Like Citybike Wien or StadtRAD Hamburg.

> If you have a link and/or some keywords I'd also be curious to read your source material btw!

I read it in a column in NRC, the source referred to is this report by the Amsterdam municipality:

https://docplayer.nl/221773234-Tussentijdse-rapportage-deelv...

Just one little note, not to disprove your argument or anything, but there's this little paragraph in the middle of the report:

> In de open antwoorden wordt door gebruikers meerdere keren aangegeven dat het openbaar vervoer wordt gemeden vanwege besmettingsgevaar.

("In the open answers, multiple users indicate public transport is being avoided due to the contagion risk.")

So it's also partially a covid thing, but yeah I don't expect that this will be the majority. Personal transport is favored over mass transport by virtually everyone after all, everything else being equal.

Also interesting in relation to sibling comments is this part:

> Fout en hinderlijk parkeren is een vast onderwerp op de reguliere overleggen tussen gemeente en aanbieder. In de vergunnings-uitvraag is specifiek gevraagd om een klachtenafhandelingsplan. De vergunning verplicht de aanbieders om binnen een bepaalde tijd klachten af te handelen, waarbij beide aanbieders in hun klachtenafhandelingsplan hebben aangegeven dit nog sneller dan de gemeentelijke criteria te doen. In de eerste voortgangsrapportage (15 januari 2021) werd duidelijk dat dit door aanbieders is gehaald.

Loosely translated: incorrect parking is always an item on the agenda between municipalities and service providers. The permit to operate the service requires a complaint procedure to be in place and the processing speed requirements from the municipality were more than met in the first evaluation.

People seem to keep bringing this up, saying the scooters are a curse that would be eradicated from their city if it were up to them, not even considering that there could possibly be a fix for this. Well...

The complaints procedure entails reporting each and every misplaced bicycle/moped to the rental company. Complaining works in that they do act on it (the thing is moved out of the way), and that they can then prove to the municipality that their complaints procedure works. But it is also (perhaps counter intuitively) completely pointless. These things are moved about all the time, being rented and used or just redistributed. I.e., if you do nothing, a misplaced moped will be moved as well — and another one parked right in the middle of the sidewalk a little later.

The problem is not that any specific moped is blocking the sidewalk for days on end, it is that there always some or several mopeds doing so — the mopeds involved vary, the problem doesn't.

Actually penalizing riders who misplace them might work, but there is no indication that the complaints procedures actually leads to these companies doing that (it is not a transparent process). They will pick out the worst offenders of course, but the people who rent these things are their paying customers; the rental companies have no economic incentive to actually punish the rider who put it there, quite the opposite!

True, good points

I agree that the 2 groups are often very distinct (though I have been almost hit by speeding delivery bikes only too often as any Dutchie would complain about). I am cognizant of the issues, I just wish the cos. would work with and talk to the residents instead of unilaterally themselves going about setting up shop.

Buy a fridge and you can order order within 24hrs.

It's useful if you're disabled, or your work schedule makes it tough to shop or any number of other reasons. Just because something isn't useful for you doesn't mean it's not useful.

You have a valid point, but the article states that they place darks stores in residential areas to decrease the delivery time.

There is a need for these services, but we also need to think about all those who are negatively impacted by this.

By placing the warehouse outside the residential area, they may increase the delivery time by 15-20 minutes. Isn't that a good enough compromise for the customers? Saving 20 minutes on grocery delivery is not worth the human cost.

They will switch to cars for delivery. No thanks. I agree that the current situation is bad. How about using all those empty properties in ahopping centra?

A lot of the supermarkets in the Netherlands have delivery options, without all the nuisance. It's just that you have to think in hours, not minutes, for delivery.

That’s a pretty small market that in no way justifies pumping enormous amounts of VC cash into putting convenience stores out of business.

I thought about offering something like this to neighbors (for small orders) just so they don't drive their car to the bakery (I use a bike).

Its very useful for couples with kids living in the center of a city.

Last New Years Eve I was cooking with my SO and among other things, we were planning on having rice. I realized at that point that I had bought brown rice by mistake, instead of white rice (small package, both look the same around here). 10 minutes later we had white rice from one these dark stores.

That one time it was really useful.

I’ve had a similar experience - was out of something for Christmas dinner iirc, and five minutes later I had it after running over to the 24-hr gas station which has a surprisingly large convenience store.

Damn, that's the dedication - triggering whole complex operation where multiple people and systems are engaged and consume energy just to get slightly different kind of rice.

I'm just thinking of the overhead. That is how much it cost to get that packet of rice in 10 minutes... With all the people involved in whole processs.

A completely different kind of rice. I love regular white rice, but find disgusting the texture and flavor of brown rice.

That’s nothing. Think about the immense scale of operation required just to let you instantly comment on someone relating that story. We have massive ships that roam the seas to keep your connectivity alive.

Isn't running noisy 24/7 businesses in residential areas and repeated threatening behaviour from riders something that the cops should be able to shut down relatively easily?

I have unfortunately had the biggest displeasure of dealing with Dutch police after someone stole my backpack.

They were useless and downright offensive. The crime happened is full view of a security camera and they refused to do anything at all about it and instead performing what I call the “European fuck you”: handing me a form to fill.

Adding insult to injury I was told that “it happened all the time” when I asked them what the fuck are they doing to stop it happening then, I was threaten for my language.

Yes.. and how often do you think they should be doing it? And where should it sit in their list of priorities?

My thoughts exactly, does amsterdam not have zoning restrictions?

Most cities in europe prefer mixed zoning, so one doesn't get those crazy suburbs. So it's normal to have businesses in the lowest floors with apartments around. But those are often small stores, cafés, restaurants etc, making the city feel alive and provide services to the residents. Not covered windows and buildings you cannot enter, and being a nuisance.

But mixed zoning usually comes with rules regarding opening hours, and a requirement to respect the neighbors' sleep. If a business repeatedly breaks those rules they get shut down.

That's how in works in my city. The rules might be different in different cities/countries, but at least nightly harassment shouldn't be something that one has to tolerate.

In the U.K. there are plenty of pubs in residential areas (as there have been since long before zoning was a thing) and they may often be noisy in the evenings. Some people will buy a house/flat next to a pub and then discover they don’t really like the noise.

There are rules about when businesses may open (and when they may sell alcohol) but a lot of them are historic Sunday trading laws or designed to give convenience stores an advantage over larger supermarkets. I think there are rules about where industrial buildings may be located. I think there are very few rules about where offices may be (and they can be open whenever) and there are probably some generic night noise laws, but eg the pub example above isn’t breaching them (you may see a pub with a sign outside asking people to be considerate or more rarely a pub with a sign that says something like ‘a pub has been here for X years and our neighbours should have known that it would be noisy in the evenings’)

The amount of barbers and hairdressers here is something to behold at times. Or even offices for some types of firms. I think it is reasonable and makes lot of sense to have these types of businesses being available near where people actually live.

I'm not really too keen on dark stores that aren't available for general public. I would much prefer regular store to one, even if that store would only be counter and pick-up only.

There are zoning laws and there is mixed zoning. There used to be many smaller shops in residential areas and since the 70s many shops have closed in favour of supermarkets and so on. In the street I lived before, there used to be many different shops such as fish shops, cheese chops, vegetables, small shops selling carpets and so on. When I moved there in 2002, the only shops left were one butcher, one bakery and one that sold cigarettes and magazines and in 2022 they all closed. These were all located in buildings with an appartment on the floors above, where typically the owner lived.

You would actually need a permit to transform the former shop into an appartment and this is mostly granted. However if you would take such a place and convert it into a 'dark store' you typically do not even need a permit! The Dutch regulations just did not expect shops to be open 24/7 in small residential areas like this and to need 24/7 supplies from big trucks and 'riders' hanging around all day and night, where typical Dutch stores would close at 6pm

I use Flink a lot in Vienna. Largely also because shopping hours are so incredibly restrictive here that using Flink is even more convenient than elsewhere. Grocery stores are required by law to close at around 8, but Flink operates two hours longer. And having even larger orders show up within 10 minutes obviously makes this even more convenient.

I'm pretty sure this type of business actually fills a niche here.

I use it for the same reason. But to be honest the real solution is to expand opening hours of normal grocery stores, or to allow something similar to Off License in the UK / Späti in Germany. It doesn’t make sense that it’s cheaper to have someone bring me beer than it is to go buy it myself.

> But to be honest the real solution is to expand opening hours of normal grocery stores.

Well, those hours need to be filled in by someone. Just like Uber, these services managed to drive down costs by paying some “contractors” to deliver food to mostly rich and well-off people. Maybe we should offer better working schedules for everyone, instead of exploiting some. Living in a state in Germany where stores close at 8 and on Sunday, I really got used to it and managed to adapt, and I’m sure a lot of the people working there do like the fact they don’t have to work until 10 or on Sundays.

> It doesn’t make sense that it’s cheaper to have someone bring me beer than it is to go buy it myself.

Yeah, because some of those costs come from the guy delivering your stuff not being an employee.

As a student, I wasn't able to work a 9-5 job, but 5PM-10PM and weekend work was a good way to make money. The alternative for many people with other obligations besides work isn't to simply work comfortable hours, it's to lose their job entirely.

Also, at least in the US, you'll often see different crowds shopping at night compared to during the day. The privileged person has a flexible work situation or a partner who goes shopping during the day, but someone who has has inflexible commitments during the day appreciates the opportunity to be able to shop at irregular hours.

At the moment, it seems those delivery brands mostly use employees and do not pay bad at all and there is just an awful lot of venture capital being poored into these companies to try and become dominant players

I see no reason why opening hours should be regulated. Then again I'm partial to the hyper market near me being open 24h every day since the change in law. Ofc, during night some services aren't available. And on other had it probably remove competitive advantage from small stores and gas stations. Still, the opening times often don't seem unreasonable.

> I see no reason why opening hours should be regulated.

Society here apparently thinks that restricting opening hours helps employees at grocery stores. I can't judge that, but public opinion is unlikely to change, so there is not much hoping for these restrictions to be lifted.

I once heard the argument about that. Somehow the whole thing does apply to shops, but not bars and restaurants. It was like that allows families to visit them, but when I asked when do those working at bars or restaurants get to visit anything I got answer they get free weekdays... The logic escapes me, why wouldn't we limit everyone equally. The families and friends can then take time off to visit restaurants in business hours during week.

Waiters tend to be paid better than supermarket staff (at least here in Austria) due to tips.

I could imagine a future system where outside of regular operating hours supermarket prices increase by x% and in return hourly salaries during that time increase by y%.

Shifting the off-core hours work from grocery store staff who are salaried employees to delivery people who are contractors (let’s be honest, as soon as one of these companies is dominating they’ll try to pull an Uber) doesn’t help anyone IMO. It’s just looking away and pretending the issue doesn’t exist.

I used to live on Fagelstraat (the street quoted in the article), directly opposite this garage. Within 4 minutes you can walk to 2 different supermarkets which are open 8am-10pm each day.

I've used one of these services (Gorillas), and while it is amazingly fast with pretty decent pricing, I'm not convinced its filling a crucial in densely populated Dutch cities, due to already easy supermarket access.

There's no doubt that a business niche is getting filled.

It's just a question of what are the true net costs of these services - and who ends up really paying for them.

On bottom it says this is originally a Wired story [1]

[1] https://www.wired.com/story/amsterdam-dark-stores/

A similar article regarding the same phenomenon in both NYC and Berlin from last week:

https://www.nytimes.com/2022/02/11/nyregion/gorillas-rapid-d...

This article is really downplaying the racial element to the stories, the complaints about "smoking, making noise, bikes blocking walkways" in a city like Amsterdam is a bit telling. Not that dark stores can be a nuisance but it's clearly a dimension in this story.

It's interesting that class prejudice is exclusively expressed as a racial issue these days.

I’m unsure how you interpreted “downplaying the racial element” and “a dimension in this story” in the GP comment to mean “exclusively.” There are numerous alternatives I can think of that the commenter could have used to indicate exclusivity, but their phrasing seems to clearly (IMO) indicate that it’s simply an element that is underplayed in this article.

When certain races are disproportionately represented in certain classes, you can't help but draw a parallel between the two issues...

I'm not claiming that's the case here (I have no idea if these "riders" referred to in the article are mostly immigrants or not), but it is certainly a common phenomenon.

That is self-contradictory for one unless you are posting from a different era.

There are plenty doing the exact opposite and insisting that all racial prejudice is somehow class based and that "class solidarity" is somehow the natural state of the world. Including infamously demanding that racial minorities basically sit down and shut up because their problems are a "distraction".

I wonder which era one needs to post so as to not be guilty of this unspecified "self" contradiction. Interesting to hear that "plenty" are making such specific demands for a random assortment of unidentified people simply categorized as racial minorities. I guess details aren't necessary when we can just say someone is doing something to some people at some point and it's not good.

Although I have no doubt that there's an element of racism in there it doesn't seem to be the root cause here.

Keep in mind that Amsterdam is a very diverse city and in general racism tends to be quite low. I'm guessing (hoping) that some of the racistic comments were spoken in a moment of frustration (which given the noise and general disturbances 24/7 would create plenty of opportunities) and do not signal a changing attitude towards "foreigners" in Amsterdam.

This is not the only hole in the story. When I would get harassed at 2am by an employee of a half-illegal business I would a) call the cops to shut down the noise, b) team up with a few neighbours to obtain legal counsel how to shut them them down. Why are the residents not doing that, or rather, why is the article not writing about that?

Edit: I don't want to talk down the racial component. It is certainly sad that the article glosses over that part of the story. But still I wonder why the residents are not doing the obvious and call the cops—or if they did, why the article doesn't talk about it.

I viewed the Instagram created by one of the residents and based on what I can see from photos of “the problems,” this seems like a classic case of NIMBYism and perhaps racism.

Interesting, could you elaborate? Is there anyone in particular they could have in mind complaining like that?

The article says it towards the end. Generally immigrants are riders for these shops I'm assuming and a rider is quoted saying riders are acting defensive:

>Ramzy Läbidi, a student who spent five months as a rider for Gorillas, believes some riders are responding to the “weird, racist comments” they receive as they deliver orders around the city. “Eventually, I think [some riders] get frustrated, and they go on vigilante mode and try to do something about it,” he says, adding that this might motivate some riders to pick fights.

AT5 (local Amsterdam news station) recently made a video about darkstores.

https://youtu.be/Owf3Uo3NC8o (Dutch, but auto-translate subtitles work pretty well)

There is one of these around the corner from my home in Chicago. I know what street it is on because I somehow managed to find it on the map recently. I was curious because I ordered some online groceries and less than five minutes from clicking the order button a mad guy turned up at my door, "YOU WILL REMEMBER ME! MY NAME IS IVAN! I AM RUSSIAN!", handed me the bag and sped off.

I'm in Chicago, what app are you using?

It was a GoPuff order.

u do remember him which made me introduce myself in this way in rhe future

Is there any evidence that dark stores are more disruptive than...normal stores? A regular supermarket gets tons of traffic, trucks unloading goods, etc. What's the difference?

the normal supermarket (or any non-gig-business) here in Germany has to provide:

- parking (bikes/cars/none if only pedestrians are there)

- some rest/change area for employees

These things cost quite a bit of money.

Now, as with most gig-economy "startups" (or should you call them moneybaths?), the "dark stores" require these things too, but at least with the locations I saw, they don't really do that. Essentially their fronts look like a branded homeless-camp. No thanks.

Also: can someone explain to me, how this concept will (like that of any other gig-economy company) be realized in any semi-equal society (aka no slavers state). Essentially you'd probably need 2/100 people working for that, nonstop. These people will basically do something which nowadays everyone but the richest people have heavily optimized already, just that it's not supposed to be optimized, because I don't think the idea is a soviet-style "hey, I bring you your allocated food, once a week".

The explicit promise is that whoever can afford this, can just call these services on a whim, meaning this is super-inefficient from a societal view (how do you optimize 10min delivery time?). Then, just letting the price decide and having all of services structured that way, you'll essentially get the slavers state, neolib. edition™. Because a lot of people working in these sectors will then be forced to choose the soviet-style solution outlined above (and you already see this!), just without being allowed a say in that matter, because that's how the system is supposed to be, no?

What a brave new world!

> how this concept will (like that of any other gig-economy company) be realized in any semi-equal society (aka no slavers state). Essentially you'd probably need 2/100 people working for that, nonstop

It can work, just not in a way that Silicon Valley VC bros want it to.

Most countries already have a legacy version of this system in place: the post office, as well as a few private courier companies. Those systems' "tick rates" are typically one day - packages are collected at depots/sorting offices early in the morning, assigned to couriers who then spend the rest of the day delivering them.

Increasing the tick rate of such a system is possible especially with smaller goods as well as being able to take advantage of more "depots" (for grocery deliveries, supermarkets are essentially the depots) - the costs will obviously be higher, but not prohibitively so.

The problem with the current delivery services is that it's fragmented - every company has their own couriers, restaurants/supermarkets, etc where not only is the supply & demand unbalanced, leading to situations where one company's couriers may be sitting idle wasting time loitering (leading to potential antisocial behavior) where anothers' might be overloaded and delivering a poor customer experience with regards to wait times. The system also has the overheads of people staying idle which is currently subsidized by treating these workers like shit and denying them employment rights/benefits.

A single marketplace providing an API for moving goods from point A to point B priced by weight, special requirements (refrigerated transport, etc), timeliness and the current state of the market (dynamic pricing) could work. This will allow the system to maximize the efficiency of the people on the ground, being able to consolidate deliveries and reduce waste (bikes or vehicles sitting idle, couriers loitering around, etc). This could be operated by the existing postal system and even use this same infrastructure for mail/package delivery.

The above system would undeniably cost more than the current VC-subsidized services which also underpay their workers and treat them like shit in general, but not by an exorbitant amount. Its costs overheads would scale linearly though which is a bad fit for VCs looking to monopolize the world, however as a public service similar to the post office it should be viable.

> A single marketplace providing an API for moving goods from point A to point B priced by weight, special requirements (refrigerated transport, etc), timeliness and the current state of the market (dynamic pricing) could work.

This is interesting but the debate between private/public services is political gridlock. Just like there's no single payer healthcare in the US because of insurance companies, this idea would be basically a nationalization of Amazon, Fedex, and UPS. I'm not sure how you'd pull that off.

I've thought about over-collateralized logistics smart contracts for something like this: post a request for transport with parcel details like size and speed desired then collect deposits from both shipper and carrier. I'm not sure people would want to deal with large deposit values to cover the potential for irresponsible carriers though.

Anecdotal and personal observations:

Regular grocery stores have dedicated service entrances for deliveries. These dark grocery stores are often just using whatever repurposed single door retail space they could get, i.e places that were built for regular foot traffic retail.

Also the amount of ebikes and delivery scooters coming and going on the sidewalks in front of these places, as well as blocking them, has become something a nuisance for pedestrians.

While not necessarily "disruptive" but certainly somewhat dystopian feeling - these dark grocery stores just put up paper over the windows. Not transitionally but permanently. It's really not any kind of an improvement over the blight of an empty storefront.

These shops in Amsterdam are even using converted residential apartments.

I suppose you could operate a dark store in a residential neighborhood where it would be impractical to impossible to operate a regular store.

Or maybe it's a fluke in zoning laws where they can legally operate a dark store but not a regular store.

Brings to mind the FreshDirect trucks squatting in the streets of NYC, acting as a mini-warehouse for the bike couriers; its literally free real estate:

https://www.reddit.com/r/NYCbike/comments/n6oi0v/a_freshdire...

I'm reminded that almost every culture has a version of a folk story such as "The goose that laid the golden egg." Someone is given a power to do something that can make them wealthy, but they lose all sense of restraint and destroy the thing that is giving them that power.

When a new business idea is introduced and someone asks: "How will this be carried to its logical extreme and become a nusiance," that's dismissed as a slippery slope argument. But it's ultimately why we have things like zoning laws. My own reaction is that new things tend to arrive in my town relatively slowly, and it's good to see how they pan out elsewhere before arriving here.

I'm confused, isn't the neighborhood who protest about these stores are also the same neighborhood who want them (that's why the stores are there in the first place)?

Or _some_ people in the neighborhood want convenience at the expense of others?

The stores have a relatively large range, but create a nuisance within a small portion.

Neighbourhoods debate all kinds of things that some people want and others don’t: strip clubs, coffeeshops, prostitution. All are legal here, but have rules because even though presumably some people find them convenient, others less so. Does that help clear up the confusion?

The stores are there because some large enterprises want to turn really quick delivery of groceries into a business model, so far they are making a loss.

Presumably, the problems do not affect those not in immediate vicinity of the warehouse/shipping operation. Those experiencing problems could be much fewer in number than those being able to be serviced by the warehouse while also being too far away to experience the problems.

Which is a way zoning laws start to be introduced.

Similarly, _some_ people in the neighbourhood want it to be quiet at the expense of others.

Within reason. I lived near a noisy neighbor (drug dealer/user etc). If you got work next day in a 9 to 5 job (like normal people) you don't want noisy drama at 3 AM.

These services have been popping up all over London too. I actually wondered if they're a front for something, because almost every other week there's a new grocery delivery service with a forgettable name.

They could be like the scooter rental start-ups, which seemed to have every hallmark of existing primarily to absorb venture capital.

If you are running a business you need permits and those permits obviously include writing about how much traffic your business can generate, noise levels at specific times, how trash is taken care of, and so on.

Here it sounds like someone set up a garage business and didn’t fill out the paperwork.

Either that’s illegal or the city is some kind of anarcholiberal extreme (which could well be the case in this example seeing as the Netherlands is often on the liberal side of business regulation, but it wouldn’t generalize to other cities so it wouldn’t really be noteworthy)

For what it’s worth, Amsterdam doesn’t have anarcholiberal zoning rules. The article describes how the situation led to a ban that was put in place here, which presumably wouldn’t fly in an anarchist city.

Sounds like everything works as intended. Except that here a specific ban shouldn’t be necessary, regular rules around traffic etc should be enough.

The whole delivery business is becoming increasingly absurd to the point where many places are in walking distance and delivery services only deliver from close places during peak hours. A really streamlined take away option would oftentimes be much better (than waiting 15 minutes at a place and worrying whether they got the order right...)

I'm not a fan of neigbhorhood nuisance, obviously, but I also feel like it's trendy to pick on new phenomena like 'dark stores' as opposed to established phenomena. For example, my biggest noise concerns in residential areas are: loud city service vehicles at extremely early hours in the day like rubbish collector trucks and the binmen throwing things around at 5 in the morning, or police/ambulances/fire trucks speeding through in the middle of the night, or the city doing overnight roadwork on a nonresidential street which intersects with the residential street and so basically makes sleeping impossible. Why are there no (popular) petitions or news articles about this more mundane but also much more universal noise pollution?

similar things can also be found in Taiwan's food delivery where IIRC there is a dark store who takes orders from 5 different "restaurants" (kinda like shell companies) on major platforms, like Uber Eats.

These are actually older than delivery foods - twenty years ago I worked at a hotel where the "cheap" restaurant and the "very fancy" restaurant had the same kitchen/cooks.

The food offered was mostly different but you certainly could order the exact same meal at the fancy restaurant for almost double the cheaper one.

I saw restaurants like these in Seattle! There was a food truck parked by China Harbor that would serve for several restaurants on Uber Eats. I’m pretty sure Uber labels these as virtual restaurants or something.

These became extremely common by the time I stopped doing Uber Eats in early 2021. As a driver I loved them because their business model was 100% aligned with delivery services and would always have food ready to go, be polite and responsive (unlike how many restaurants treated drivers), occasionally give a free water bottle as a thank you, etc.

I love how pizzeria/kebab shop me has 3 different store fronts on same service... All selling pizza... At least the other one have just two and one for wings etc. with different branding, though over double the transport cost... Go figure that mess...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ghost_kitchen

> For orders to be delivered within apps’ 10- or 20-minute targets, delivery companies need real estate within residential areas, forcing locals to live next door to the businesses.

Do zoning laws not effect this?

They might not. Commercial zoning around me involves a storefront or front desk. I run a startup out of my house legally because of that (which is really just my office).

It’s hard not to be cynical about business like this.

I don’t think the exec team believes it to be a sustainable long term situation. The business model is avoid regulation using the latest ubiquitous tech and don’t pay for externalities.

The only way to have groceries delivered in 10 minutes is to co-locate distribution points with residential areas + have access to labour willing to make an easy buck.

There’s a huge supply of poorly educated, unemployed immigrants in Amsterdam and in NL. I don’t blame them for jumping on this.

Wow. I thought one of the cool things living in a European city was how many local stores within walking distance of most housing in urban centers.

Yes that is one of the cool things and it's not just European cities but it's true for living in any walking city or even living in a walkable part of a city. And yet here we are. These have sprouted up in NYC and London as well, with all the same concerns. What I can't understand is why someone would pay all of that money to live in a city like Amsterdam, London or NYC and not wan't to go out and interact with their environment and neighborhood. What's further confounding is that after 2 years of forced isolation via lockdowns and work from home that people would not relish the opportunity to get out of their small apartments and appreciate the walking, window shopping, and people watching that comes with it.

I'm truly baffled about how these services seem fairly popular in Berlin.

I literally live across the street from one supermarket, and within a 5 minute walk from 3-4 others. Yet one of these grocery delivery services has a warehouse right down my street.

If you have a disability or you're quarantining it seems fantastic, but otherwise...just go to the grocery store??

I'm in your exact situation, but... going to the store. Putting stuff in a cart. Waiting in line, like sibling said. Unloading it from the cart. Reloading it in the cart. Carrying it home.

I just described several steps that are a complete monotonous waste of my time and that I consider unpleasant and that someone else is willing to do for me if I give them a sum of money I can afford not to care about.

That's amazing, imo. (At least for me; I don't know how amazing it is for them, even if I tip highly.)

It is kind of funny, but, hey, humans are kind of funny. I'd rather not even walk outside for a minute to throw my trash into the bins; if I could leave it outside my door and have a person/robot pick it up, that'd be sweet. :p You can take this to an extreme, where you eliminate every unpleasant task via some magical means, and that world sounds like paradise. Cue dystopic collapse of some kind.

>> Cue dystopic collapse of some kind

You mean like living out your days in a life-sustaining pod that automatically flushes your waste products away while your body provides electricity to the grid?

I live minutes away from a Walmart and I've still ordered stuff for delivery a few days later, as it's a minimum 20-30 minutes to get something. Even the grocery store across the street is a 15m trip. I could see people not wanting to spend the time.

(However, most grocery items are a pain in the arse to find online and order, so it's often shorter time wise for me to go to the store.)

I don’t like waiting in line. Also, German grocery stores are not as nice as in the US or NL. Basic food, long lines, very rude staff.

> German grocery stores are not as nice as in the US

I've used both and German stores seem to me to be ok. US stores are also ok although the quality of fresh produce seems to be less good and generally the fresh baked goods are much worse.

Are they evenly distributed? I'm in lake view chicago and there are 5 in a 15 minute walk they just happen to be like all 15 minutes as I'm like right in the middle of all them. There are clusters though where you could go to any of 5 different grocery stores within a 5 minute walk.

Yeah, I can't imagine this ever being worth the VC money where I'm from for this reason. But who knows.

In my opinion, most of these ventures will fail (or be consolidated) because they aren't charging as much as they could for the service. As a result most of their business is probably delivering pints of Ben and Jerry's to people after all of the stores have closed.

How much could they charge, and why? At least where I'm from with a supermarket always nearby, the convenience factor is going to be worth something, but they'll always have to compete with just picking things up yourself, which I'm assuming will always cost a lot less. Doesn't feel like there's room for a whole lot of margin on top of that.

There are probably two main segments of customer for this service. Customer A cares about convenience, and customer B cares about saving time (also logistics). One could argue that they are the same thing, but there is a difference in degree.

Customer B can arguably save an hour of their time by having a large order of groceries delivered. How much is that time worth? Ten dollars/euros is an easy minimum value to set. That will probably turn away most prospective customers but the remaining customers that do use the service will be buying a lot more groceries per trip.

It's not just about how much that time is worth to them, but also how much cheaper the alternative is. For example, when we're talking about large orders of groceries, the "regular" supermarkets can already deliver that to you at a price of around €5. I don't see people paying significantly more than that just to be able to have it delivered within ten minutes, because that usually doesn't result in significant additional time savings.

(I also imagine that even at a €10 price point, delivering large orders within ten minutes will still be loss-making, which I suppose is fine if you're trying to eliminate competition, but not if you're going to be unable to raise those prices in the long term.)

I agree, I wasn't really thinking about 10 minute delivery. And I think grocery stores could charge more for delivery, but there seems to be some implicit cost-savings for them to deliver which offsets the need for a higher delivery charge.

My main thought is that I think there is a larger opportunity to provide delivery of a higher quality service and that the current delivery startups seem to be focused on the bottom rung.

Taking restaurants as an example... Where I live, I can order food delivery in under one hour from hundreds of restaurants that is almost guaranteed to be crap. It would be nice to be able to order direct from a better restaurant and have it be edible. I would be willing to schedule this days in advance and for a specific time in the evening, almost like a reservation. But no one to my knowledge has presented this as an option to restaurants or consumers. Instead everything is haphazard which imposes a burden on restaurant kitchens and results in unpredictable results for customers.

How can you run a small warehouse in a residential street? What about zoning?

Isn't zoning primarily based upon traffic patterns and emissions as a rationale? A warehouse isn't usually a high traffic area. (Distribution center is the orientation there, implying more throughput and less storage relatively speaking.)

Compliance aside the real question should be why are they zoned that way, and should they be? The ancient "kingdoms of land, sea, and air" taxonomy was abandoned for a reason.

Zoning in the netherlands is nowhere as onerous as it is in America.

A big reason the Netherlands is such a great country is that that it's well planned out. They must have a shittone of planning rules and procedure to achieve that. They do promote mixed use development, mixing business and residential. But a warehouse is more industrial, I assume they dont want to mix residential and industrial?

I think big issue is that these warehouses and dark kitchens actually take out of the retail space otherwise available, thus making the services to those in immediate vicinity worse.

Wouldn't that only hold if they displaced existing actually utilized retail services. A "Viking Hat Tube Attention Grabber" store doesn't contribute to services if nobody actually shops there.

> assume they don't want to mix residential and industrial?

Why not? Residential buildings and light industry can exist in close proximity without too much trouble as long as everyone behaves properly.

Sure, I guess I don't know whether these qualify as warehouses or shops, I suppose that's the ambiguity the start-ups are trying to exploit.

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Looks like a bug in our software that tries to detect canonical URLs. I'll look into it.

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