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Comment by ardemue | Hacker News Reader

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).

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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.

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.

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