I tried Google Shopping Express (a similar idea) for a while and found that what really matters is how delivery works. I'm typically at work all day and I (like most San Franciscans?) don't have a doorman to receive deliveries.
These Amazon pages don't say much, but they show pictures of delivery trucks in front of Victorians like mine and a grocery bag on a welcome mat. If they left a bag full of food in my entryway like that it'd probably last 20 minutes before being stolen.
You have the option of "Attended Delivery" with Fresh, where they make sure to hand it over to you, or doorstep, where they leave it outside. In my current neighbourhood (South Bay) I have no trouble with unattended delivery and prefer not worrying about being home in time for my Google Shopping Express deliveries, but it would be totally different living in San Francisco.
Thanks! That makes sense. I didn't see this in their docs, ut your comment inspired me to look harder. It seems their "learn more" link doesn't say much, but if you pick "Help" from the footer it has a more detailed FAQ that says what your comment does.
I don't like unattended or scheduled delivery. This is what Vons does, in LA. However, we also have Yummy.com which provides delivery instantly. I've bought from them a few times, and they show up literally faster than a pizza does. We're talking 20-30 mins, in LA traffic. I don't even know how they do it. I can barely get my car out of the garage and to the market in that amount of time, let alone going up and down each aisle and going through checkout.
It's impressive service. I would do it all the time if the prices were lower and selection was better.
I've got a storage space with Extra Space Storage and if you leave a key with them they'll put your deliveries in your locker for you. It is really convenient! I've got just a small 5x5 room that costs me like $90/month... Along with deliveries I keep my winter gear, backpacking gear, and all sorts of other stuff that I don't really need sitting around me house.
Disclaimer: I don't work for these guys, have any investments, or anything to gain, I just like the service.
That's an interesting solution. It seems to me if you have to go to a storage space to pick up you groceries you could just as well go to a grocery store to pick up your groceries, couldn't you?
At least half the convenience of Instacart for me is ordering my groceries from a computer: It allows me to plan meals, look up recipes, and check nutritional information. And using search is easier than wandering around a grocery store.
I assume you don't have some side yard that the delivery man can locate the goods out of sight?
I have had groceries stolen from my front porch before (usually that never happens), but never if I take the time to instruct the delivery person to leave it in the side yard (front part is closed but not locked). If you still feel the need to keep it locked, perhaps a simple (i.e., 4 digit) combo lock?
This is the main reason I roll my eyes whenever people say self-driving cars are the future of product delivery. After hundreds of years of history in mass delivery systems, we still haven't figured out how to interact with customers at a human level...no way in hell a robot is going to be better at it any time soon.
Think harder! The vehicle only has to arrive when you are actually there to pick up whatever it has. Robot drivers don't get tired, need bathroom breaks or get impatient. You can share your location if on your way home so it can meet you exactly as you arrive.
The vehicle can then have lockboxes. You enter a code and it opens up letting you access your stuff. (Or you use your phone or whatever.)
How could that compete with a UPS driver that drops the boxes off and goes to the next place? People don't all arrive home at different times, so a vehicle cannot choose to show up at any place at any time. While the vehicle is waiting for someone else to arrive, they could have already delivered to many more places. Even without paying a driver and a larger number of vehicles, the efficiency of delivery seems lower and the cost higher.
A UPS driver is time constrained hence a vehicle sized because of their costs and routing to make best use of their time. Neither constraint exists for driverless vehicles.
I suspect the solutions that do get deployed will be something like a larger vehicle in the delivery area acting as a distribution point, and smaller ones making the deliveries from there.
Ahh but now you violate the cost assumptions of sequntially optimized delivery routes, exploding your fuel costs...a phenomenally bad idea. Tell me, are your delivery vehicles 10x more fuel efficient than a UPS van? Because that is the minimum range of efficiency that you'll have to acheive to make your plan viable, let alone cost effective. I'm not exaggerating either... you just added an entirely new dimension (delivery windows) to an already NP-hard Traveling Salesman problem. I wouldn't be surprised to hit a 100x increase in fuel costs for a pure scheduled delivery.
A UPS van sitting somewhere waiting is expensive because of the human inside. A driverless one costs nothing (except some refrigeration if applicable). Additionally residential have lower fuel costs for electric vehicles. It doesn't matter if the driverless vehicle takes 4 hours to deliver to an area when a UPS guy could have done it in an hour.
Note that UPS costs come from having the human. They need larger vehicles to absorb that cost, and then have to get the most bang for the buck in the time used. Driverless deliver can use different sized vehicles and time is far less important.
Except that your new idea (entirely distinct from your first idea where the autonomous driver could schedule its arrival to coincide with the consumer's whims) also is flawed. It is entirely common for an entire day's worth of fuel to be 1-3x the cost of the driver...especially so urban operations. Driving a minimal distance maximizes the driver's productivity, true...but it also minimizes the distance traveled, which minimizes the fuel consumed and the associated maintenance (which hovers around 40% of fuel costs). What you are now proposing isn't much better...instead of an autonomous vehicle running around catering to the scheduled whims of consumers, you have much more of them (which is a capital cost that scales linearly with peak usage during peak delivery times, while most sit idle for most of the day), running full round trips to a depot for every single delivery.
I'm all for creative solutions to problems. Your solutions just aren't creative enough. Operations Research scientists have been working on this exact problem for well over four decades...UPS probably employs 1/3 of the logistics-specialized OR professionals in the entire world. Saying these solutions are simple, or just require a little bit more thought, is not much different from saying that proving P=NP is simple and requires just a little bit more thought. In fact, it is exactly like that.
Why wouldn't the fuel be electricity which has no weight? And urban areas use considerably less of it (lower speeds etc). I didn't say the delivery vehicles do exactly one delivery at a time.
The point is that driverless vehicles can be different sizes than current vehicles, and are significantly less constrained because of no human driver. Consequently the delivery strategy can better match financials. They can do things like meet you as you get home. Or wait somewhere for 30 minutes to better match delivery windows. Or charge more for priority. Or deliver at 3am. Or bring vehicles from other areas to match changing demand.
Fewer constraints means more scope for optimisation.
Isn't $299 a year a lot of money? Here in London the major supermarkets have time slots where they deliver for free (typically late in the evening), but even a prime time delivery, let's say, Sunday morning, costs no more than £5. The most upmarket online vendor, Ocado, offers one year of free deliveries, anytime, for £40.
Ok, there's also Amazon Prime thrown in, which is good; and I suppose that in the Bay Area the average delivery journey is longer than in London. Still, it seems a bit steep to me. Maybe it tries to place itself as a luxury service in the Amazon range?
Yea but if it's in the Bay Area it's news worthy innovation.
(e.g. I ordered food from NTUC, Carrefour (when they were still around) and Cold Storage super market websites for delivery in Singapore three, four years ago. They have done it even longer than that)
Interesting that they're opening with a different price model than Seattle's. $299/year and according to GeekWire their groceries are approximately 14% higher than in-store.
I kind of like grocery shopping, especially if it's in a decent store that has enough registers open and where the vegetables aren't molding on the shelves and the cans aren't all dented.
I still use Amazon Fresh in Seattle, but I wish there was an acceptable alternative. I'm seeing the same thing - prices, delivery fees, minimum orders going up, selection constantly decreasing. I can walk to small local groceries and farmer's markets for fresh stuff, but Amazon's still my best option for getting the boring stuff without getting in the car.
I could almost kind of justify it if the selection were better (especially since they also deliver from local businesses and offer Amazon.com items), but everything I tried to buy today was either completely unavailable (cat litter and chicken sausage), or only available next day (super fancy chicken sausage from some local meat market that I could just go and get myself today in 10 minutes), and I couldn't purchase an order under $35 even if I wanted to pay more on top of the still inflated prices. Amazon also offered up breastmilk storage bags when I tried searching for gallon milk. Iiiinnnnteresting.
I really wanted an alternative to Instacart and Google Shopping Express especially for the random Amazon items I'd want to throw in and a little more competition (really missing Trader Joes delivery), but I'm pretty disappointed so far. I was in Seattle this past weekend and I was super pumped to try it just to buy a water kettle for my hotel room and going all "I wish this were in SF!" but I can't actually find anything that I want to buy at home that would come faster/better than regular Prime shipping or competing services.
I ended up ordering from Instacart with almost everything I wanted instead because I was so frustrated (and I would walk to the local market but I'm sick). Easily would have been willing to migrate my grocery shopping to any service but they're all kind of shitty so :(
Double-parking quick delivery trucks remind me of nothing but the 2000 bubble. Here's one way too big for the parking spot about to block a fire hydrant in the Upper Haight just last night: http://imgur.com/61lAhjW
Interesting to see a new spin on this. Webvan was one of the biggest busts of the dot com era (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Webvan) -- interesting that Amazon resurrected it..
More interesting... They bought Kiva Systems for $775 million from Mick Mountz, a former Webvan employee who identified warehouse fulfillment as a prohibitive cost in delivering groceries.
> It's unclear if Amazon has actually started using Kiva, though.
Yeah. They use them a lot. A lot, a lot. It was cheaper to buy the company than pay to outfit every FC. All newish fulfillment centers ( http://www.amazonfulfillmentcareers.com/amazon-fulfillment/l... ) are divided into "kiva" and "non-kiva" areas. I think there is only one FC that is fully "kiva," but it may be as many as 3 now. Details are NDA.
Webvan was the best thing born of the 1st dotcom era, sadly it was unsustainable. Their timing was perfect for me - I was car-less in SF with kids and the local grocery store had recently gone under leaving me with a bus trip in order to grocery shop. Delivery to my 3rd floor walkup was awfully nice in comparison and well worth the approx. 10% markup. They had really nice crates too, I have 3 that I still use for various things.
I wonder if this is an experiment to bring all Amazon shipping in house? This would fit with their huge distribution system build out across the globe. In the meantime Amazon's relationship with UPS and FedEx is not disturbed.
What we need is another kind of mail box. A "AmazonBox", but takes deliveries from other companies as well. Big, refrigerated, with a public/private key.
Yes but going down to the 7/11 to pick up your groceries defeats the point of delivering groceries. People need lockers at their house or at the very least the nearest street corner.
Has anyone noticed that they give you gigantic bags for free? Our office (LA not SF) orders fresh all the time for basic food and they always give us enormous re-usable bags.
I'm trying to figure out, are they doing this on purpose (paper bags would be cheaper)? I'm assuming they are, hoping that you'll go shopping and use their cool bags and using this as a method of free advertising.
Here in the south bay I don't have InstaCart, but my local Safeway does deliver.
The experience isn't the best (someone has to be there and sign) but a) I have a nanny and b) I don't pay $299 or 14% more for the items.. in fact, I would pay less as I don't carry a loyalty card, but deliveries give you the loyalty price (presumably, they collect the same kind of info anyway).
It's a matter of I don't want to carry the card around with me, and I'm lazy - I'll do all the signup for the convenience of delivery, but just lower prices? - not worth my time - at the counter I can usually whine and convince them to use their "default" loyalty card, and get the lower prices with no "tracking".
These Amazon pages don't say much, but they show pictures of delivery trucks in front of Victorians like mine and a grocery bag on a welcome mat. If they left a bag full of food in my entryway like that it'd probably last 20 minutes before being stolen.