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Amazon did in fact try a drive-through facility in Bellevue, WA (a suburb of Seattle) a few years ago where customers could pick up previously ordered items.

http://downtownbellevue.com/2007/09/27/amazon-fresh-online-g...

In France at least there are a lot of places like this. For example I shop at Leclerc Drive where you order and pay online. It's ready 2 hours later and you have 24 hours to get it at a physical location. Once you get there, you scan a customer card or your nfc smartphone and somebody comes to your car with your products in bags (frozen, refrigerated and room temp being in different bags) in like 2 ou 3 minutes. If you want to, you don't even have to get out of your car as the guy will load it up your trunk, but most people just help out.

I live in a moderately big city and there are 4 Leclerc Drives (www.leclercdrive.fr), and then there's Chronodrive (www.chronodrive.com) and U (www.coursesu.com).

Yeah, most supermarkets in medium cities and larger offer drive services.

I don't have a car however, so I have been looking at orders delivered to my door, and the offer is still rather poor. I'm in Lille, and even though it's a rather large city only Monoprix and Auchan offer that. Even not considering the shipping and handling charges Monoprix is already more expensive than all the other supermarkets, and Auchan online has very few products offered, to the point of being completely unsuitable as my main groceries source.

The few first orders to Monoprix bear large discounts though (which actually made the end price cheaper than what I would have paid in the nearby "real" supermarket) so I tried their service, and I am very pleased with it, to the point where I'm almost ready to use them more often even if they're more expensive.

Groceries get delivered to my door the day after, at the hour I choose, this looks like the future to me.

Many large cities in France also have a local fruits and vegetable delivery company (usually with mostly organic and/or local products).

Well, anyway, what I want to say is that I'm very pleased with the recent development of these services. I can finally skip spending hours in a supermarket every week and hauling back my things by bike or public transport.

Another french customer here, offers "to your door" are a lot more limited in products than the drive services (those tend to be much more like what is on offer in the supermarket if you go in person)

Those are great services. Pro tip if you have a garder, order your compost bags there, they are dirt cheap & they put them in your trunk, no more hassle.

This is new to me but it does not surprise me. France has been light years ahead on the supermarket front for many decades.

Chip and pin arrived in France when the rest of the world were still writing cheques and doing carbon copies for credit cards, with the bank having to be called if the amount was over the card guarantee limit.

The out of town big box hypermarkets were also a part of the French landscape at a time when in the UK people would have to push some mini-trolley around a 'Fine Fare' or other such defunct supermarket in some town centre shopping arcade.

A few local grocery stores offer this. You order online and pick it up in a drive through area a little while later.

Example: http://www.harristeeter.com/express_lane/express_lane.aspx

Do a lot of people use this?

A HT is my primary grocery store. Every time I'm there someone is out front getting loaded up.

I think this will be an option in the near/mid term.

I've long assumed Amazon would compete more directly with both shippers & big box stores - by combining optional last mile delivery for items as well as potentially pick up points.

Fresh probably can't work very efficiently outside of a few hyper-condense markets. But ordering everything online and driving through to pickup a preselected batch - of groceries, cables, clothing, electronics (whatever)... that is very doable. You just need regional fulfillment centers (check) and then smaller local pick up points... this could be achieved with an acquisition or two.

If you can afford the markup on their groceries, Amazon Fresh in Seattle's delivery can occur in less than 12 hours (sometimes <6). The only thing that's kept me from using Fresh as a utility is price. Local grocery stores still win on price.

If you're laid up in bed and can't leave the house, Fresh is awesome.

I've seen grocery stores offering this.

Giant: http://www.peapod.com/ Ralphs: http://shop.mywebgrocer.com/ Safeway offers same day delivery: http://shop.safeway.com/ecom/home

That's a few different regions, and the Ralphs has been doing it for over five years. I bet the idea has spread to most major cities by now.

I don't know why this hasn't just displaced normal grocery shopping. Lack of knowledge about it or customer comfort, hard to establish new buying trends for basic purchases, no idea.

> It's also unacceptable to wait 2 days to get what I order.

In Seattle, there is often an option for same-day delivery. I suspect they'll eventually roll that out to most cities, assuming it's a successful experiment. I had a ~3 hour turn around the other day (ordered something at 11am and it arrived around 2pm) for a total shipping cost of $2.99 w/ Amazon Prime. It was kind of crazy and made me realize I'm living in the future.

I think this will happen, but with autonomously driven vehicles.

While you're at work, your car will leave and drive through an amazon warehouse at 1mph. Someone picks your order, loads it into the trunk of your slow moving vehicle which then returns to your office. End of the day, your goods are there.

Lots of problems to solve between where we are and there, but I do think that's where we're headed.

I'm confused, since when does Amazon Fresh take 2 days? I put in an order last night around 11pm and the stuff was on my doorstep at 4am.

Amazon Locker is a little like that: you can pick up purchases from specific locations (though you do need to order them ahead of time).

I think there's something to an idea like this. So much time right now is wasted grocery shopping. I mentioned this in a comment a while back about Instacart:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5039418

They do now, sorta. It's called Amazon Locker: http://www.amazon.com/gp/help/customer/display.html/?nodeId=...

> It's also unacceptable to wait 2 days to get what I order.

Relevant - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uEY58fiSK8E

Peapod.com does exactly this in some of their service locations.

> It's also unacceptable to wait 2 days to get what I order.

Holy crap you need a reality check.

I remember when mail-order took a month, if you were lucky. [sigh wistfully for the good ole' days] And there was this round thingy on the phone that hurt my finger if I had to do a lot of dialing.

You're missing the context of this being grocery items. For most people a multiple day wait for their groceries would be unacceptable.

I've been getting groceries delivered for years now from Peapod (and a brief trial with Freshdirect). We get our groceries delivered two or three days after we place our order - you might be able to get them sooner, but I think it costs more for that option.

You know what we never have to do? Spend more than 5-10 minutes shopping for two weeks' worth of groceries. I don't even leave the couch, and when the delivery person shows up, they take the bags right into the kitchen.

Totally acceptable.

This is not most peoples' grocery shopping experience or expectation.

I spend 5-10 minutes deciding which potatoes to buy in a big supermarket. My choice of potatoes will probably be good for 3 meals and I like to get the right ones. I will carry them home, up a big hill with plenty of other food items, by bicycle. I will peel, prepare and cook them with a great deal of care.

The idea of them being bought from some standing order setup on some ipad screen for them to just arrive and be placed into the kitchen is just mind-blowing. I don't know if I could live like that.

In the future houses will have kitchen cupboards that can be opened from outside, probably with some steel shutter/garage door type of arrangement. You probably won't even have to have Mr delivery man step in the house, he will back fill the cupboards and even take away any out of date items for you.

You know what we never have to do? Spend more than 5-10 minutes shopping for two weeks' worth of groceries. I don't even leave the couch, and when the delivery person shows up, they take the bags right into the kitchen.

Now all you need to do is buy a robot that feeds you and open a hole in your couch to put a toilet in.

But seriously, people need to get out, see the 4-5 types of tomatoes and buy the right ones. Your version works for a subsection of people, most will plan grocery shopping on their way back from work or as family time. you can buy the shampoo and Gillete razors once every few months, but for many things can't beat the 'see, touch and buy. '

As someone who gets Safeway delivery, Google Shopping Express and Amazon Prime, I see Prime as the slower of the options, and recently it's not even been price competitive on many things (example: Cereal).

While I know GSX is still "beta", I'm sure those who have Instacart would agree - same day is awesome, and it's available now in many places (and i don't have to pay $300 per year to participate).

I think the times are changing. Perhaps it's you who needs a reality check, but as the world goes along I think it'll become "unacceptable" for a package to take more than a day or two to arrive.

At least that's where I see things going.

Instacart (chicago) just did an order for me in 3 hours. Ordered around 1pm, driver delivered around 4. Pretty amazing turn-around time.

"I really need those cough meds right now."

"Mooooom, we're out of milk, and I want CEREAL!!!"

"Alright, so I have everything for dinner, but it looks like we're a little low on butter, so I can't make the cake like I wanted to :/"

Now add that you have kids to the scenario, and you've got to drag them along to what should be a 3 minute shopping trip.

There are a lot of situations where taking that long for something is pretty unacceptable.

I can see how 2 days can be unacceptable, but those reasons are just plain bad planning.

People plan poorly. There's a lot of money to be made helping people through that.

And when these services are widespread, people will be free of the necessity to expend energy "planning" their access to the essentials of life. Then we can focus on bigger and better things.

How would this service solve running out of milk at breakfast? How is this a problem that must be solved before we focus on bigger and better things?

This is bigger and better things. Every cancer research scientist with kids probably loses hours of potential work time a month dealing with dumb shit like "we're out of milk" that this would solve. I don't think being super-narrow-minded about "big ideas" contributes a whole lot to the progress of society; if it's something lots of people are willing to pay for, you have to accept the possibility that it's useful and contributes to society in a way that you couldn't think of immediately.

Seriously? Bad planning? Those reasons are things that happen to everyone, sometime. Are you perfect?

Bad planning happens.

Eh, cough syrup expires. I had a nasty cough a few months ago, and discovered that my previous bottle of cough syrup was 5 years old.

Have you heard of subscribe and save? It prevents all of those (given fresh) and saves amazon in shipping costs.

I have not; but the point around my list was the sudden 'woops', where things are eaten up more quickly than expected, or there's a surprise one-off expense. Cough syrup, in particular, is more of a one-off thing. Most people don't run out of it on a schedule

Sadly, like the Target predicting a pregnant teen, Amazon could probably use data to figure out when you need cough medicine.

The ultimate operations experience is JIT arrival based on predictive behaviors.

That sort of research could be invaluable to the CDC and may in fact be worth researching more closely

Or.. you can use the myriad of grocery delivery services available to get a delivery within hours. Not everything needs to be bought on Amazon.

> Or.. you can use the myriad of grocery delivery services available to get a delivery within hours. Not everything needs to be bought on Amazon.

You make it sounds like they're commonplace.

Most major metropolitan areas have grocery delivery services either via the grocery stores themselves or a TaskRabbit like service (Instacart, etc.)

Not this one. TaskRabbit doesn't serve Atlanta, Instacart is limited to a small number of cities and doesn't exist this far out from Atlanta's core, and none of the 7 grocery store chains within 30 miles delivers.

I find the definition of oneself "as a consumer with children". What parent isn't a 'consumer'? Some isolated hill-family that shoots their own food and lives off the land? It sounds like there's some sort of entitlement expected from that definition, the same way people expect entitlement when they say "as a taxpayer..."

A single person doesn't have to manage the additional stress of children wanting to play with our touch all the things in the store.

Children don't want to have to be drug around to a store just so they don't get in trouble / hurt at home.

So, there is a bit of difference between a consumer and a consumer that has children. The difference being that the monotonous tasks like shopping are more difficult with rogue agents.

I don't have kids, this is just my assessment of the situation.

Please read my comment again, and you'll see that it's not the "with children" part that I am talking about. My first sentence is admittedly missing a bit: "... to be weird". Describing yourself as a consumer is entirely redundant in this context, and it makes it sound like you should get special treatment for some reason.

Ah. That wasn't me, that was deftnerd. I didn't read the subtext in their words that you did. Then again, I agree shopping with kids is a greater hassle than shopping without them, so I probably just skimmed over it without any mental triggers or bias.

Why? My grandmother didn't have electricity in her home, but she could buy groceries in 15 minutes. It's not exactly a great luxury.

As a consumer with children, it's a major hassle to go to the grocery store with my kids in tow. It's also unacceptable to wait 2 days to get what I order.

Not sure if someone else picking them for you is the same. Maybe one day we'll reach that level, but I doubt what you suggested is better than putting your kids in a cart, give e candy or toy and shop.