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Comment by housingisaright | Hacker News Reader

Are these grocery-delivery services popular in the states / somwehere else? Never understood the market for them in the EU. Either you live in a city, have - at worst - 10-15 min to walk to a store, or you live outside a city where it is 10-15 min with a car to a store and the service is not available. They will die as soon as they stop subsidize the cost with VC money.

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To be honest, I live a two minutes walk from my grocery store and I’ve used these services a few times. Sometimes with discount codes they’re been cheaper than my grocery store, but we all know that’s just setting VC money on fire for customer acquisition. Thanks for the free beers VCs! When I don’t have a discount code I usually use these services if I’m feeling sick.

Anecdote of course but I'm in the states and I love grocery delivery. It's far better, imo, than food delivery ever was. I can order my groceries a few minutes before I get off work and by the time I get home I have everything I need to cook supper.

I'm generally not a huge fan of hyper-convience and often take the mentality of "I can just do it myself" but in this case I very much embrace the delivery of groceries.

We have found the quality of groceries delivered to often be lackluster. Worse than curb delivery even, where unrelated substitutes, messed up produce, and expired food are fairly common.

Think winter, rain, snow Babies Single parents Not wanting to get dressed Etc There is a market but agree not large enough to sustain this much competition

In these weather conditions these services either stop working or get ~1hr waiting times. At least in Germany

In most of these conditions you can usually plan ahead and use the delivery function of any of the major supermarkets - at half the price and ten times the selection. Their delivery window might be a one-hour slot tomorrow, but for anything but impulse purchases or shopping for the 1%ers that's mighty fine.

It’s very popular in Dubai and India as cheap labour makes it economically feasible.

Also one of the plays is they collect data on your purchase habits and can stock better /suggest higher margin alternatives.

The Estonian delivery startup Starship uses tiny self-driving robots. I wonder if those can be made cost-efficient.

They launched around me last month at around 50 cents per delivery and I used it quite a bit. Now that the introductory period is over and the fee is 1.50, I just get off my ass and walk.

The funny thing is if they launched with $2.50 delivery and cut the price to $1.50, I think many people would feel differently about the current price.

They would not have even got off the ground at 2.50. Remember that salaries in Europe are generally lower than in the USA.

I feel the same about these electric scooter services like Bird, Lime, etc. Most European cities are very walkeable and so you’re not “getting another car off the road” as Bird will happily tell you. You’re paying for the luxury that you’re 2 minutes faster compared to walking.

Anecdotal evidence, but I work with tons of people who ride those scooters to work. Most of them have one of their own though.

I pay for that luxury, and I like it. For me it‘s a short-distance bicycle without the parking problem (i.e. need to pick up my bike later). I live in Stockholm.

For longer distances I prefer bicycles. In London, for example, the Santander bikes are fantastic.

I have taken scooters where I would otherwise have taken a taxi. A minority of my rides though.

The problem with this in my city is that the scooters are substantially more expensive than the taxi, which doesn't make any sense. I've often found that I can choose between a 1h scooter ride or a 30m taxi ride, and the scooter would be about twice the price.

I've used them a few times just for the fun of riding, and they are probably cheaper for very short distances, but that's it.

The traffic is so bad in my city that a 30 minute taxi ride is as fast as a 15 minute scooter ride in many days.

A restaurant is just paying for the luxury to have someone else cook, serve, and clean up.

Sounds like it could be a sustainable business.

A restaurant is about the whole experience, for having someone else to cook there are pizza, donner, kebab, pita, shawarma, sandwiches,....

That's splitting hairs. Restaurants can be fancy or functional, they can serve fast food or slow food etc. McDonald's is a restaurant, as is The Fat Duck.

What they all have in common, and the main appeal, is that they cook things better or faster or with less effort than you would, and they spare you the effort of cleaning up afterwards.

McDonald's wished it was a restaurant.

There is a reason why food trucks aren't called a restaurant on wheels.

I think you may be ascribing more weight to the etymology of food trucks than is intended. Most food trucks one finds in small to mid sized urban areas are small, effective restaurants in outdoor dining areas. Absolutely part of the experience.

A restaurant is any place where you get cooked food in exchange for money, and have a place to sit down.

You take those scooters for 2 reasons:

1. For fun 2. To go somewhere far and fast ( cause you are in a hurry )

The market for them is in the comfort. While cooking you notice that something is missing, oh can't leave as the oven is running, so you order what is missing. Or the baby cries and you don't want to put it in the stroller and go out to get something, or you are watching the championship game on TV, but chips and beer are out, so you order.

How to make a working business out of that, however is the question. Margin and value isn't high enough, especially as the space is quite competed.

It works better for the weekly groceries run. Instead of wasting time in the shop and carrying into the apartment just order the things needed.

Euro here. Closest supermarket is small with lame variety. And I hate big supermarkets in big malls. It also helps to stay away from impulsive purchases (= aka junk food).

Delivery will probably stop once investors no longer finance it (here it's mostly supermarket chains financing delivery). Hopefuully click-to-collect survives. Seems like a good compromise.

It's much more convenient if you have a system for doing groceries. Compare visiting 2 stores in walking distance (~ 90 minutes total) vs putting a predefined list into your basket and optionally add or remove a few items (~ 10 minutes).

You can easily do that in Germany with some traditional supermarket chains, e.g. REWE, create your online basket, then when ready do the 5 minute walk to pick it up without dealing with the supermarket confusion.

It depends on the business.

Amazon Go in Spain and the supermarket deliveries in the UK are hugely popular because a lot of people don't have cars in the larger cities - so it's very convenient to get everything delivered in one batch.

Supermarket deliveries are popular, but are third party delivery services for groceries? I don't have any stats, but anecdotally I'd say not.

From people I know who uses them, it seems to be mostly useful because you can get things delivered to you in like one hour instead of having to have it delivered next week, which the service the supermarkets themselves offer. Some companies even can deliver groceries in just 10-15 minutes.

> you can get things delivered to you in like one hour instead of having to have it delivered next week, which the service the supermarkets themselves offer.

I just checked Sainsburys (a major supermarket in the UK for anyone who doesn't know it), and I can book a delivery slot for 6 hours from now for £4. It's not an hour, but it's definitely not a week.

If you or your partner is craving ice cream, chocolate, or something, 6 hours might mentally just round up to a week.

I checked all the major supermarkets in the south-western EU country I'm in for the week, all give me delivery times for next week, FWIW, YMMV and yadda yadda.

Have you tried the "ultrafast" ones? I tried it for the first time a couple months ago and it's pretty mind-blowing. An order of 15 different items reaches my door literally 11 minutes after I press the "submit order" button. I'm in the UK and I have a supermarket a ~5 minute walk away but picking up the same items myself from there would take me at least twice as long (not including the time to get ready/dressed etc). I don't use it for all my shopping (it's a bit more expensive, but it's mostly because I like to get out of the house) but the convenience and speed of the ultrafast app delivery is really something. I hope they don't all crash and burn.

For me the service they offer is exchanging money for time:

Going into a shop is more than the walk or drive. It is looking for a product, waiting in line if there is a line to pay, start the car, drive back, look for a parking spot. I would say that shopping 2-3 products from a 10-15 minute store, could cost at least 30 to 60 minutes time if going on foot and if driving probably more than one hour.

I count this time from the moment I decide I have the need until I am back home.

If a grocery delivery service can buy in the same time from the same store for at least two people I would say they also decrease fuel consumption. This could be a long shot.

You'd think, but online supermarket delivery is pretty well established in some European countries. Tesco in the UK and Superquinn in Ireland launched services in 2000 or so (iirc the superquinn one wasn't strictly even internet-based to start with; they gave you software on a CD that just dialed their modems...). Though the fact that supermarket delivery is well-established makes these third party grocery delivery services even more baffling, really.

I have a (discount) supermarket literally next door, but I still have groceries delivered once a week. The quality is better, the selection is better, I don't have to lug around cases of beer like I did at university. There is no venture capital involved, it's not cheap, they've been doing this for many years, and there is one delivery per week, ordered three days in advance.

I was wondering about it, too. I used it maybe twice to deliver heavier items like 24 liters of water. The prices were similar if not higher and in the case of vegetables I couldn't check them before buying, so I see little point in using it. It's not a big deal to just visit a grocery on my way home, and it's not an unpleasant experience, so why should I get rid of it?

The market is convenience. There are obviously people who will pay a fee to avoid a 40 minute round trip at a time which isn't convenient for them. Whether that fee will be enough to cover costs is not clear. And it's always going to be the first thing that people cut back on if they feel any financial pressures.

I've been using grocery delivery since 2019 and it's great. The traffic is so bad I hated having to drive to shop and carrying by hand for the whole family was difficult.

If you live in a big city you're unlikely to have a car. I lived in London for 15 years and the only people who had cars were those who needed it for work.

Sometimes you have COVID and shouldn't be walking to a store.

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