Instacartlove

Having the ability to pickup and deliver from multiple locations throughout a city like Postmates or Instacart does is a huge advantage. At least for a one hour delivery. Density of drivers in a city is an important factor as well. If you can route a driver to a location nearby instead of a single warehouse you can be more efficient. Instacart and Postmates also both have high frequency categories that they can use to leverage less frequent items, e.g essentials over time and potentially at lower costs.

This is basically Postmates.

As far as i know, both Instacart and Postmates make money with every delivery. They used the last two years to figure out what to charge and when. Both get kickbacks from select merchants, both are in a heavy growth phase and both have tweaked their algorithms to either allow for multiple deliveries per hour or use in-store shoppers for faster access to gods. What they are doing is working and it looks impressive to me. The really interesting differentiator is that one of them can become a giant supermarket without owning any warehouse space and the other has a shot at powering local deliveries everywhere. But then again, maybe they both still figure all this out.

"They've nailed the difficult math behind the logistics issues - basically a scaled version of the traveling salesman problem."

This is so much bullshit it makes my eyes hurt. They "talk" about this a lot but it's not even related dude! Read some books.

I really hope Instacart and Postmates can compete with them! I see different use case for all of them. My first choice for groceries that i need the same day would be Instacart, i also love the on-demand food from great restaurants and the ability to get a few grocery items within the hour by Postmates and Google Shopping Express looks like a good Amazon alternative.