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Comment by roryirvine | Hacker News Reader

I live in inner London. I have multiple grocery shops around me - within 10 minutes' walk I have a fishmonger, two butchers, two delicatessens, three bakeries, three greengrocers, four mid-sized organic/international grocers, six patisseries, a large Lidl, and a very large Sainsbury's supermarket.

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).

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There is a gas station that sells candy and stale jerky, a hard, sidewalk-less 10 minutes walk from me (probably 20). Not sure it would be feasible to go anywhere else. -American

That's the thing, though - you'd think that this would result in these "heavyweight" Ocado-style home delivery options being more viable in the US than in London. And yet, they're not.

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.

Another possibility: For perishable goods in the sort of SKU counts typically offered, it can't work unless it has a certain minimum scale. Local supermarkets supported by a largely automated (and has been for 30 years) regional distribution center have that scale from walk-in traffic. A new delivery service using high-density storage could save on real estate and labor costs on the backend, but it has to have runway to replace a lot of the local market (which may take a decade), and the whole time you're scaling, these low-velocity SKUs are literally spoiling while these expensive, high-throughput robots are mostly idle. The frontend costs of delivery are a separate category of problem.

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.

Sure, but that's a matter of raising capital - which, again, you would think would favour the US over the UK.

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.

When I go to visit the Midwest in the winter, the perishables are… non-existent.

More like 30!

You live in the suburbs, or a small turn, or a city?

How do people in your area generally get groceries?

Balancing out the other comment - there's two real supermarkets within a fifteen minute walk of me (another American). It's fun to leave meal planning up to whatever is on sale that night.

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.

You underestimate how hard people’s food preferences are. They are really locked into their set of brands for each item. Immigrants pay huge markups to just get the same brand of tomato paste or beans they know. These are some of the most commodity style food items

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