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Comment by edwardy20 | Hacker News Reader

Not that impressive (to me at least). Food delivery has been around since forever- pizza gets to my house in 10 minutes. I don't see why groceries should be different.

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Pizza places have maybe 20 ingredients in stock that all get used at a pretty predictable rate. Keeping something like a much larger selection of fruits available and fresh when you can't freeze them is a somewhat harder problem.

Does Walmart or Target not deliver? In the UK all the large supermarkets (Tesco, Sainsbury's, M&S, Asda) let you order online and deliver to your house. They actually just get someone to go round a supermarket and pick the stuff off the shelves.

Online grocery shopping is more developed in the UK than any other major market. A large part of it is the London effect where you have a large number of middle-class shoppers who don't have cars in close proximity to each other, that makes the economics vastly better for the supermarkets.

Perhaps, though I know Oxford also has home delivery so it's not just London. I've not understood how Oxford could have it but San Francisco doesn't.

Safeway has done home delivery since at least March, so it's not an unknown service here in the US.

That's true to an extent, but I've also had deliveries from supermarkets in incredibly rural areas whilst on holiday, once to a farmhouse which was so remote you couldn't see any of the neighbours.

A really nice pizza place will have about 50 pizza ingredients in total, plus another couple dozen things on the side when you count salads, drinks, desserts, etc.

The definition of "really nice pizza place" is incredibly regional. To me, 50+ potential ingredients is an immediate turn-off. One of my favorite pizza places will actually yell at you if you ask for pepperoni or even shaky cheese.

Sure, whatever. I don't really want to play pizza snob, I just wanted to point out that some places have some multiple more ingredients than 20.

It's a good point. Even so, it's all still in about the same order of magnitude, totally different ballgame than running a grocery store.

I can't work out why this is so difficult. They already have forecasting to work out how much fruit produce to put out for sale in the store. If you order online, then they already have the stock data so if they run out then they just say that they are sold out.

I don't believe inventory management is that crude that they can't do deliveries in short time. Given that supermarkets were doing it in an albeit slightly longer timeframe (weekly), then I don't see why they can't refine the process to be same day. If anything, it gets the stock out of the store more quickly and they make a quicker sale.

Oh, I absolutely think it is doable. I've used local grocery store delivery services several times and, when there is an issue with stock, they just call you up and ask if a reasonable substitution is okay. Those delivery services, run by the store itself, would have a 2-3 day waiting period, but that I believe was more of a picking/delivery scheduling thing than an inventory management thing.

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