[ghaff]

>Delivery services work very well in places with very high income inequality.

This is true of any personal services that depend on relatively low-skill labor. Being able to "timeshare" (e.g. Uber/private cars vs. full-time driver) helps to a degree. But, in general, until you get to quite high wealth levels, relatively few people can really afford to constantly shell out for cooks, cleaners, handymen, nannies, etc. on a day-to-day basis in the West.

[pedrocr]

I agree with that. But the market expectation is very different. In businesses like groceries there is a general expectation that deliveries will continue to grow even though there's no reasonable expectation that the unit economics will improve dramatically. The market keeps growing though, with all those deliveries subsidized by the regular store sales.

[ghaff]

>The market keeps growing though, with all those deliveries subsidized by the regular store sales.

You can only grow subsidies so far. I expect as things hopefully get back to come semblance of normal and VC subsidies evaporate, a lot of these delivery options evaporate as most people decide they'd just as soon keep their money and spend a few minutes picking up their own groceries or their own takeout.

Given the failure of businesses like Webvan--and the fairly limited growth of Peapod--I'm not sure I see the continuing growth.

[pedrocr]

> I'm not sure I see the continuing growth.

You're probably thinking of startups only. Traditional retailers are growing their delivery services pretty much everywhere in the world.

[ghaff]

Not so much startups only but, yeah, I was thinking primarily of fast local deliveries of perishables of various types.

For delivery more broadly I agree outside of some categories. While online shopping is still a fairly low percentage, it's growing. One also suspects that many will come out of the current situation thinking "That delivery stuff worked pretty well. Maybe I don't need to run some of those errands I normally do."