[anderskev]

I never used Grocery, but used Amazon Fresh a few times in recent months. The experience was awful and after 3 orders I went back to just going to a store. Amazon clearly pays their last mile delivery people way under market and it shows. Rude, unprofessional, late and then harass you until you until you fork over a cash tip high enough to make it worth their effort. They also have a strange hangup about getting the bags back--one guy just kept the cooler bags in his van and handed me a stack of half melted frozen chicken, on another delivery my items were just left in the vestibule of my building, again not in a cooler bag.

This is pretty much exactly what I would do if I was at a job where: 1) I didn't care at all and it was temporary 2) I'm also getting paid nothing to do it. So I can't really fault the delivery people in this situation.

The TL;DR is that there is just no margin when it comes to food. Grocery, restaurants, meal kits, etc. People keep trying to deliver these experiences to your home, and having spent 5 years cooking in a restaurant and my entire childhood growing up on a farm I've reached the conclusion that it can't be done. Once you add in the cost of human labor for physical delivery, the margins go from slim to negative.

[iamatworknow]

> People keep trying to deliver these experiences to your home, and having spent 5 years cooking in a restaurant and my entire childhood growing up on a farm I've reached the conclusion that it can't be done.

I think you (and I) might be in the minority here and not their intended market. I don't know anyone with experience cooking who would prefer any meal or grocery delivery services over just doing it themselves. They're probably only focused on the market whose only previous alternative is instant/frozen meals or takeout.

To us: Shitty delivery + mediocre quality = Net negative

To their intended market: Delivery on par with take out + quality that's better than take out = Net positive

[petra]

Maybe, at this stage, Grocery pickup is The right thing to build.

A very convenient experience, and it gets a lot of people doing the order online.

Once you have that, and if you can convince people to get their orders at a fixed weekly window, you get delivery density, which is key at lowering shipping costs.

And as far making delivery times convenient in this method - you need to loan your customers a passively chilled box they can put on their porch, so they can pick the deliveries when they come home.

Maybe Amazon could have done this while skipping pickup. But since it's less convenient , it's hard to convince people to pay more, and maybe competitors are cheaper.

But going straight away to on-demand deliveries, with 2 hour delivery time? Sure, that's crazy.