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Comment by user_7832 | Hacker News Reader

> 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.

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> 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.

> 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.)

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.

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.

> 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 :)

> Please speak for yourself.

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

> But it's rarely useful.

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

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.

I can't imagine buying produce without actually seeing 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.

(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...)

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.

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.

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.

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