I don’t understand why there aren’t ghost groceries, similar to ghost kitchens or warehouses. Delivery is now large enough that having someone walk around a large store optimized for display, one order at a time, is super inefficient.
Just have warehouses/stores optimized for delivery and batch the orders. Boost productivity and start paying people decent already.
> I don’t understand why there aren’t ghost groceries, similar to ghost kitchens or warehouses.
There are. FreshDirect has a state-of-the-art facility in the Bronx, and I'm sure Amazon has several ghost groceries also -- e.g. they just bought two Fairways locations.
Pretty cool. Fresh Direct got started early and they rewired the entire supply chain. That's a tall order.
Instacart and the local grocery store should be able to work together to make incremental changes to what they are doing today. That seems like the low hanging fruit that could be put into operation in short order.
That's what Webvan was. 20 years too early. Some of the Webvan people went to Amazon and worked on their warehouse technology. Webvan had 3% market share in 30 cities, and they needed 30% market share in 3 cities to be profitable.
Also, back then the technology for sub-minimum-wage delivery gig workers hadn't been perfected yet.
+1. This model also limits the stock to whatever items are available on store shelves.
I put in an order later in the day, and half the stuff I ordered was unavailable because the store shelves weren't being restocked before closing. I was stunned. I had naively assumed that the food was coming from an Amazon-like warehouse, where they knew exactly what was in stock prior to ordering. A pretty terrible experience overall.
I expect Amazon will at some point leverage Whole Foods to build a proper food warehouse with the experience we've come to expect from Amazon Prime. The big supermarket chains better get their act together quick, before Amazon eats their lunch.
> I expect Amazon will at some point leverage Whole Foods to build a proper food warehouse with the experience we've come to expect from Amazon Prime
They do this depending on your metro/area. Here in SF-proper (dogpatch) there is a brick and mortar Whole Foods ~0.7 miles away, but my Whole Foods online orders get packaged from a nearby Amazon Warehouse even closer to my residence.
The experience has been very good for me so far and I have no need for an Instacart-like service.
During the beginning of the 2020 lockdowns, at least one Whole Foods location near downtown San Francisco completely closed to everyone but shoppers for delivery services. I only learned this after walking 15 minutes from my apartment to pick up some much-needed food. I don’t know how long it stayed like that.
The crazy thing is my local Whole Foods always has a noticeable number of what I assume are Amazon Fresh contractors scurrying around buying large carts of groceries to ferry to people. Fair enough, except didn't Amazon's other employees just go to the trouble of loading everything off of trucks and onto the store shelves a couple hours previously? Why not cut out the middle man and load the goods from the trucks or back room into the delivery vans for the last mile? Hilarious to me that the store floor, optimized as it is for everyday grocery shoppers, is also Amazon's best technology for getting goods out of the hands of one set of employees (excuse me-- contractors-- don't want to bring a lawsuit down on anyone) and into another's.
Last mile delivery is hard to do efficiently. Sending someone into a huge warehouse to pick up and package, say , two cucumbers and a jar of olives, is ridiculous, so you need to collect items destined for last mile delivery in bulk. Then you divide them up further. To do this you need to create a separate section of your warehouse.
For groceries you have the additional challenge that different items need to be stored differently (cooled, frozen) during the time between getting retrieved from the big warehouse and being sent on their last mile.
You can build something for this, of course, but that’s expensive. In the case of Amazon, however, they already have facilities for storing smaller amounts of different groceries products that are relatively efficient for sending small amounts of products on their way for last mile delivery: they own supermarkets.
A decade ago I worked on some retail logistics and we ran up against exactly this problem. The solution we came up with was also exactly this: send workers into the nearest supermarket to collect the requested items from there. If you already own the supermarkets and have staff running around there, it’s a no-brainer. In fact, if you look closely you’ll see many retail companies, both large and small, do this.
Rather then supermarket employees running around the shop they build automated warehouses specifically optimised for picking/packing efficiency.
I simply don't see the reason for services like Instacart and Amazon fresh to exist... I can already get deliveries picked and dispatched by the super markets themselves. I count 6 different services within 5 miles of my home/office/isolation bunker.
I think the original idea behind supermarkets with long rows of shelves was that some work was being offloaded to the customer. An assembly line where the people move and the items are still, or something like that. So, it actually does track that the format works well for Amazon’s purposes.
I don't understand why greengrocers aren't eating Blue Apron's and competitors' lunch. They already have the inventory; put it in a bag with a recipe and drop it off at retail price at a few hundred customers' front doors. No more food spoiling on the stands, faster inventory turnover, good PR.
Blue Apron was slowly collapsing before the pandemic, I have no idea how they've been doing since. I think the main reason groceries aren't competing with them is because it's not a good business for anything other than attracting investors.
The two biggest supermarket chains in Australia, and some independently owned supermarkets in my area offer home delivery. I know Coles and Woolworths do have what they call dark stores, which are set up to serve home deliveries and not open to the public, but most orders are picked at your closest store. I even order produce from the farmers market since you can get home delivery. Most places charge $10 for delivery, but offer free delivery if you spend over $100, $200.
And i haven't lived in the uk in a while but Ocado is still doing all the deliveries itself I believe, which restricts it in terms of coverage and availability slots, doesn't it? A British friend was complaining that during lockdown there were never any available slots.
It's worth noting that off the back of Ocado's success, all major UK supermarkets also offer online delivery. And my understanding is that this is mostly serviced directly from stockrooms rather than going via store shelves (albeit individual store stockrooms).
Ocado started deliveries in 2002 selling products from Waitrose shelves, but it was only in major cities (maybe just London?).
Around the same time Tesco (I can't find exact dates, but when I started working there in 2004 it had already been around for a while) launched their competing service, however they did so across the whole country (at any store big enough and with enough parking space to support it).
> Delivery is now large enough that having someone walk around a large store optimized for display, one order at a time, is super inefficient.
If it isn't apparent by now, the people who are still walking around a large store aren't driven by efficiency. They want something to do / enjoy the routine of it, and don't want someone else picking out their stuff for them.
Just have warehouses/stores optimized for delivery and batch the orders. Boost productivity and start paying people decent already.