I visit those local shops once or twice almost every day to pick up fresh bits and pieces - but I still get bulky or heavy stuff delivered by Ocado (toilet roll, washing powder, everyday wine, that sort of thing).
Sure, you have Doordash-style same-hour options which are largely based on someone picking stuff up from a local store on your behalf (we have lots of those too). But the Ocado/Kroger robotic hive fulfilment centres ought to be more efficient than that whilst offering higher quality by cutting out the labour-intensive warehouse -> store -> shelf -> checkout part of the process.
I think some of it comes from a feeling of "that can't possibly work", perhaps as a hangover from the failure of Webvan during the dotcom boom. Maybe with some "well, I have to use my car for everything else, so I might as well use it to collect groceries too" layered on top.
Which all points to it being a fairly intractable problem - there are a bunch of only tangentially-related issues that need sorting out before it can be become a widespread success.
Replacing the regional distribution center instead with even higher levels of automation, and getting your groceries delivered from the same warehouse the supermarket is, would give you the scale from the start... but then that increases your frontend delivery costs and more importantly your frontend delivery latency; High latency is a much worse thing with milk than with books or hammers.
To be fair, though, the bulk of Ocado's initial investors were from the retail and finance worlds - and the difference between the US and UK is smaller in those fields than it is for tech.
How do people in your area generally get groceries?
For people in the outer suburbs where that's not an option, I don't know why a service hasn't arisen where you can plug in, "we have X adults living here, they average Y meals per week made at home, we want Z grams of protein per meal, here's our dietary restrictions, solve that system of equations out of whatever's in your warehouse and take a flat rate for delivery and percentage for your overhead." The pure delivery services all seem to be plays to hide huge prices behind tricky introductory rates. Both my local supermarkets offer delivery and presumably have the data to make that possible but they want me to still pick individual items in a vastly worse interface (any website or app) than the experience of standing in a dry goods aisle.
All juices/waters/beers/wines, paper towels, lots of oranges/grapefruits, cleaning products like bleach/detergent, etc. When they carry them up to your fourth-floor door it's just so much easier.
The smallish shops are good for stuff you can then easily carry in a bag by hand -- meat, veg, cheese, fresh bread.
For instance, I called in to the patisserie this morning on a whim to treat myself to a pain au chocolat for breakfast. And I think I fancy cheese for dinner, so after work I'll nip out to the deli for some stilton and the greengrocer for walnuts and figs to go with it. I've already got fancy crackers and some good port from my last online delivery so that's everything I need for dinner.
I'm used to being able to pick stuff up according to what I feel like eating on the day. Yeah, it wouldn't be a huge quality of life reduction to have to plan meals in advance but why bother if I don't have to?
Plus, when I'm working from home, it keeps me from being entirely sedentary on a miserable, drizzly winter's day when I might not otherwise have bothered leaving the house, so it has physical & mental health benefits too.
It's also one of the reasons I don't really like working from home.
When I was young, I worked in a couple of supermarkets. There were a lot of people who came in each day and bought one thing. Not because that's the one thing they needed that day, but because going to the supermarket was their only interaction with other human beings.
I was young, so I thought they were just poor planners. But there was this one guy who I knew would be in the dairy aisle at 4:35pm every day, and I started having his cup of yogurt ready for him when he walked through. It was he who explained to me why certain people were low-volume regulars.
Delivery is for less frequent things that last much longer.
Local ships are for more frequent things that spoil quickly.
And adding the heavier/bulkier things to my local trips, even in smaller quantities, just makes the bags too heavy and unwieldy in the end. I only have two hands. Plus it's way more expensive to buy paper towels as individual rolls than in packs of six.
Instead of having to fight with a machine to give back my empty cans/plastic bottles, I can just give the delivery person a crate and get my money back.
Doesn't capture all my groceries, I love biking or walking to a smaller shop on occasion, or if I have a specific craving, but 90% of my groceries is delivery.
And I've not yet been able to establish the right criteria to guess how a person is buying their groceries.
Location, age, income, number of people in the household, physical ability...
A single guy living in the city center with good income? Takes his car to go in big supermarket outside the city.
A family with four kids living in the suburbs? Goes everyday in the small shops.
Planners. The people who have a meal plan in Google Calendar for the next week and rarely have to "grab one thing on the way home from the store". The people who literally have no idea what they're eating on Thursday will go to the store today or tomorrow, who knows what they'll buy.
Multitaskers. The people who do their grocery shopping on the couch while not really watching TV, or similar downtime when its job #2. I used to shop online while theoretically cooking. It'll be five minutes until this is done I'll spend a couple minutes looking in the fridge for eggs / milk / etc and add to next weeks order.
A specific criteria I've found is people in general don't trust the delivery services for non-hyperprocessed food. I can trust a sealed bag of oreos is like every other mass produced food-adjacent substance. I want to select my own roast from whats on the shelf or my own apples. So people who only eat processed food products that come in plastic tend to like online ordering, people who mostly eat more natural food tend to dislike online ordering.
You have to know people pretty well to determine their project management style and their diet.
I'm a planner and that's one of the reasons I don't order my groceries. If there's one thing I know I can't rely on, it's to be delivered on schedule and/or receiving exactly what I ordered.
Meanwhile if I go to the store, I can find an alternative or go elsewhere if I can't find what I wanted.
And I'm also a "natural food" person, so I'd rather pick things myself. Furthermore, if I crush a fruit on my way home, it's on me and I'll deal with it peacefully. If I'm being delivered a crush fruit, I'll get mad at the company I ordered from and I'll have find a way to be compensated.
Like almost everything people complain about nowadays, this is not a tech problem, has never been a tech problem, and cannot be fixed with tech.
I think here in France the best example is Lidl. The stores are laid out the same, so not only your usual store doesn't change, but you can go to any store in the country and find what you want at the same spot.
Personally, with self-checkout, I spend less than 15mn in the store to do a week of groceries.
Thought differently most major chains capture all of this data and can optimize stores for sales.
I think the bigger complaint is a typical US grocery store carries an insane amount of SKUs. If I was just going to Trader Joe’s it’s no problem. Low sku count layouts never change. Walmart has probably 10x the skus and it’s a struggle sometimes just finding what you want. Oh I need dry dill, well in the spice section there are 3 or 4 brands. Within those sometimes it’s not in alphabetical order. Things are misplaced or just out of stock.
Like a lot of people who work from home there is big difference between the time required to shop, and taking a few minutes away from my desk to get some stuff from the door to the fridge.
I live in the U.S. and have almost never used a service like Instacart. Also, when I see the item I’m trying to order in Amazon is fulfilled by Whole Foods, I typically don’t buy it, because of the additional cost.
I’d rather suffer a small amount of inconvenience to save several dollars on groceries, and often it may mean that I may need to order a different brand to pick up a similar item at a local store.
However, I’ll gladly pay a little additional money for Amazon for many other items, because it’s convenient, shipping is included in Prime, and because I can get what I want.
I make the majority of my retail purchases at a supermarket, followed by Amazon online (Prime only), then a very small percentage in-person at Target, Walmart, or a hardware/home supplies store or some random online retailer.
The best I can do to “shop local” is to use a supermarket chain; there is no mom-and-pop to support that isn’t a chain unless it’s a restaurant. I don’t pretend that this is actually “shopping locally”.
I’ve only participated in a boycott once or twice, because there is typically a practical reason for shopping when and where I do- either I need to shop then because I don’t get out much, or there’s a sale with actually lower prices, rather than the frequent “increase the price just to cut it to get you to order more” thing, which I also get sucked into, because I don’t have time to price shop, unless it’s with camelcamelcamel for Amazon.
They’ll ship me a $10 <thing my project needs> almost always for free and often next day, sometimes same day. And their prices are competitive in general with Amazon and supplyhouse.com.
I don’t know that it’s a great (or even sustainable) offering from their business angle, but I love it as a consumer and DIYer!
They are a bigger fish than the mom and pop stores but that just means that it will take a little longer for the Amazon Prime monopoly cash flow to devour it.
The idea of paying a subscription for the privilege of being scammed sounds ridiculous. The cost of deliveries doesn't magically go down because you're paying a subscription. You're paying for it either way. Either you're overpaying on the subscription because you're not ordering enough or you're overpaying in the form of higher prices that contain the remaining delivery fee.
Sure, if you do a full accounting of costs you may win or lose, but fundamentally people are paying for simplicity. Because almost everyone is lazy, or too busy, or too afraid of random scammers, or whatever, and they played their cards right to become the Sears Catalog from the 19th century in the 21st century.
edit - and one thing that helped them get there is the return policy, so if you get one of those scam sellers, or they sent you wrong crap, opened crap, or just plain everyday crap, you press a couple buttons, maybe drop something off at a UPS store, and problem solved. That definitely shields them from the fallout from their endless listings from sellers like QWERTY123 and ZXCVBN789, and provides an advantage over any other online ordering that doesn't have the same massive advantage of scale.
Predictable delivery, easy/generous customer service, best/tied-for-best price, excellent selection. I'm not sure which part of that is uncompetitive...
(If you know a better price on Airpods 3 Pro or a base M4 Air, do let me know as I'm always happy to save money.)
The prices on amazon are comparable to what I see elsewhere for everything I've ordered. The thing that sets amazon apart is that their delivery is blazing fast compared to everyone else. Yes, the reviews are always a little suspect, if I see tons of empty 5 star reviews, I suspect the product, but in general, I've been satisfied with my purchases.
I’ve been buying on Amazon for 20 years, and I just avoid high value items. It’s great as an AliExpress with an easy return policy. If I get a fake or whatever, I return it or I toss it.
For higher value items, I go to other retailers, such as Costco.
1) When I really need it within a couple of days and can't quickly find it locally
2) When it isn't carried locally (the local retail stock is a lot thinner than 20 years ago)
3) If there is a BIG price difference -- used to be common but now much rarer. As you say, Amazon's prices are often worse than buying locally.
4) When I need it shipped somewhere else. I usually spend Christmas, for example in another city, and it is impractical to bring a bunch of presents. Amazon is good for situations like that.In general, I prefer buying local, because it makes my community healthier -- more jobs, directly and indirectly, more options to buy something this afternoon if I really need it. But the reality is that many items are already very difficult to buy. Some of that was true 20 years ago, but it's gotten much worse.
Self checkout is fine for small trips, but expecting people to do so for a cart full of groceries is ridiculous. This trend started at walmart but has started moving up the chain to higher priced stores. I just flatly refuse to do the grocer's work for them when I'm not actually saving any money at checkout for doing so.
However, Danish supermarkets are generally kept small by regulation, meaning that there are very few supermarket that could be considered big by international standards.
It’s a more limited selection but there’s plenty to choose from and I’m done picking out my groceries in five minutes. They magically show up at my door for very little extra cost and I don’t have to bicker with my kids about grabbing a bunch of random stuff either.
I’m not saying you’re wrong for feeling that way, but you’d be surprised how much work it is to go to a grocery store, no matter how close it is. It’s important to think about other factors here.
I mean I'm not feeling any particular way; I don't have a problem with the neighbours using it. I'm somewhat surprised that it makes sense for them, but each to their own. Myself, I just shop on the way home from work (my walk brings me past one of the supermarkets).
I find tipping for grocery delivery adds pretty significantly to the cost.
Most people don't live in city centers. Because they are the most expensive places to live in.
This is village with a population of a bit less than 3000, which I only know about because I have walked East-West across most of the state of Brandenburg (from Słubice in Poland to the city of Brandenburg) and this trains station was a convenient break point:
https://www.google.com/maps/@52.3459295,14.2800967,3a,60y,14...
Here's Aberystwyth, where I did my degree, population 13k, nearby villages boost that by about 6k, students by another 8k:
https://www.google.com/maps/@52.4145833,-4.0848806,3a,75y,19...
I grew up on the south coast of the UK. Which is certainly expensive overall, but it has cheap areas like Leigh Park which used to be entirely council houses (i.e. made for poor people and run by the local council):
https://www.google.com/maps/place/Leigh+Park,+Havant,+UK/@50...
The other two show pedestrianised areas, and all three show pedestrians without any indication of how they go there. When I to to similar areas in my town (pop approx 23k) I have drive there, park, and then walk around.
I have several shops within easy walking distance and many people (including me) do walk to them, but quite a few drive. Few bikes (kids mostly) at shops although leisure cycling is VERY popular here.
One of the nice things about an edge of town area with its own identity as a village is we have a lot of local stuff which is walkable and friendly.
Yes, and? "Cars are popular" is not a surprising claim that anyone has been contradicting, so far as I can see. (Also, Aberystwyth is tiny enough to get around entirely on foot, and hilly enough that bikers have to be exceptionally fit, and yet despite this, bike racks).
> The other two show pedestrianised areas, and all three show pedestrians without any indication of how they go there.
The Edeka in Briesen is one of the other two, I don't see a pedestrianised area, do you mean the car park owing to the open-air market set up in it?
The other one (Leigh Park) is literally in the middle of a typical UK conurbation with, as is normal in the UK, approximately universal pedestrian access. People can walk there easily from their homes, they can cycle, they can drive, they might even take a bus. One thing they're really not likely to do is come from very far away, because the only people who know about Leigh Park are the adjacent parts of the conurbation and they mostly look up their noses at it because it's poor.
My point is that it is not "shops with bike racks" that are the alternative to online groceries, it is a mix that definitely involves more use of cars than bikes, plus probably more walking and public transport than bikes too.
To your point, I agree, it's definitely not just bikes: I could bike to my local stores, I actually walk most of the time. With the "e.g."/"exclusive" split: Back when I was commuting, I did so by bus and train, and would also often go via a shop on the way home. The Briesen example is close to the train station, so my guess is that many of the locals would do likewise.
I'd go further though, we do order online about once every 6-8 weeks, because bulk purchasing 18 litres of soy milk and another 9 of long-life cow milk that way is more convenient than frequent small purchases at the same time as the perishables.
I never had a car in London, and would not want to drive in central London. Public transport is faster, less tiring, and while not cheap, is cheaper than running a car.
Living in Cheshire a car is a necessity.
Still, they are popular.
But also, definitely not the Ocado model.