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Cool idea, but I just can't get my head around the economics of many of these VC-subsidized economy companies. I don't claim to be the smartest guy in the room, so I would love to be educated on the how companies like Shyp and Instacart can make a profit, and what assumptions underlie this. Any takers?

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for Instacart for example; the postage fee of $3, or whatever they advertise is more of a trojan horse. The company makes most of it's money through partnering with stores and also marking up the prices of items. i.e. the price that an item has on Instacart is not the same as the price the item is actually sold for if you go into a Safeway (or whatever) store.

Even with markup, shopping & delivery are expensive. They'll have the 1%ers but I doubt they can scale beyond when they have to compete with Google and Amazon. Google could spend $1b/year for 10-years preparing this market for driverless/drone-based delivery. And this would be a rounding error on their balance sheet. No one, not even Amazon has that muscle.

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