[bluegatty]

It's still probably more efficient for you to just drive to the centralized place.

The amount of optimization and process improvements required to 'beat that' will be enormous, like infrastructural change enormous.

Your car is very useful an generalized and adaptable.

So are you.

Only you know what you really want, the nuances of comparison, seeing things real, returning them.

Economies of scale work extremely well for Costco.

'Home Delivery' is the operational argument that does not work very well.

If there were a hyper standard for mailboxes and automated delivery for tons of things - and - everyone bought into the same delivery standard, aka robots to the same warehouses, bringing multiple items to people on the same street - then that starts to work out, but we're a long ways away from that.

Home Delivery - in most situations - is effectively a first world luxury.

FYI - meal delivery depends on loopholes on migration, healthcare, work permits, working conditions that if they were all closed and up to standard - would make it just to costly in many situations.

[glpgeFwac]

Home delivery being a first world luxury is a joke. Delivery is a labor intensive low-skill activity. It's fifty times better in developing countries, at least in the cities, where the marginal cost of sending someone to your house is so much lower.

Unless you meant it's a luxury only in the first world, which I could get behind, especially food delivery.

[bluegatty]

Food Delivery is a First World Luxury - meaning that it's the only scenario in which the system functions reasonably (aka it's inherently expensive, a true economic luxury). Food Delivery is Cheap in places where the system is completely defunct, it's not a luxury it's a sign of failure.

[mlrtime]

Agreed with this statement. I've lived all over the world and have seen the wide differences.

I still remember living in a large suburb in India (not in the city; people had cars). We sat down for dinner and I asked if they had any ketchup. The host picked up the phone, spoke for 10 seconds, and 5 minutes later a boy knocked on the door with nothing but a single bottle in his hand. There wasn't even a grocery store close to the house that I could see.

Never living in any top-rated US cities have I seen anything close to that.

[light_hue_1]

> Home Delivery - in most situations - is effectively a first world luxury.

The comments here always blow me away by how totally out of touch with the rest of the world many posters are. No, home delivery is not a luxury, it just works really poorly in your country.

India is going through a 15 minute or less delivery boom right now. It's gotten so popular that the government is asking companies to not promise 10 minutes because that would endanger drivers.

The standard is China is 30 minutes home delivery.

It has nothing to do with loopholes on anything. Just someone managed to convince you that what you've got is better than what exists out there already.

[handle584]

> It has nothing to do with loopholes on anything.

Not sure about India but delivery in China has everything to do with loopholes.

No health care and social security for most, and for the few who have the company artificially fake income for tax evasion.

Working conditions are the usual 12~14 hours a day with 2~4 days off a month.

The electric bike they are riding are dangerously over-limits and categorizes as motorcycles, which are actually banned in most big cities. Of the few that allow it, Shanghai for example, you need to pay ~$70k for registration alone.

In the US the situation is better but not free from problems, for example the first job for a lot of the illegal immigrants who can not speak English is package sorting with similar working schedule, but at least it pays good enough.

[bluegatty]

The comments here always blow me away by how totally out of touch with the rest of the world many posters are.

Yes, home delivery is a luxury, and it 'does not work' in India - it's only evidence of an utterly broken system.

It's a sign of radical inefficiency and economic failure that labour is being used for those kinds of things because it's extremely unproductive.

"It has nothing to do with loopholes on anything. "

--> it's entirely about 'loopholes' <---

Food delivery is not 'efficient' in India - it's the least efficient process imaginable - that can only work because 'loopholes' - marginal cost of labour is cheap aka no rights, no standards, high unemployment, low wages, externalizations and corruption, sketchy taxation, safety, social insurance, healthcare, emissions, food safety etc.

The only place in the world where 'Food Delivery Works' - is for rich people in First World countries.

That is the only scenario in which labour, rights, wages, taxation, non-corruption safety etc. are all met and the 'comparative value' (aka price) still works out.

That's it - the top 10% in the Denmark etc. can have their food delivered in a way that is 'economically efficient' (maybe >10% for some things) - aka those are the only people 'willing to pay a true fair market price when all of the externalizations are built into the model'.

We're making some progress with automation, probably China are leaders there but it's still not closed to automated and won't be because the marginal cost of labour is still low.

[underlipton]

You are correct, and the problem is an embarrassing lack of understanding and imagination on the part of the people criticizing you. An entire car dedicated to delivering one meal at a time, directly to the recipient, should be exorbitantly expensive to cover labor and resource costs for the driver; the artificially low prices customers pay are borne by drivers, who see essentially zero return in the long run when their profits are netted against vehicle costs.

What actually works is delivery of multiple orders to a semi-central location for last-mile pick-up by the customers. In a sense, this is what restaurants and grocery stores are. But to retain the variety, readiness, etc. of delivery, obviously some new solution must come around.

[Eezee]

How is a delivery service unproductive? Division of labor is one of the most fundamental principles in our economic system. You being able to do it yourself in your free time doesn't make it unproductive. You could also make your own clothes, that doesn't make the clothes industry an unproductive endeavor.

[mlrtime]

You state things as fact without citing a reason.

For the person getting the item, it is [extremely] productive.

[wwind123]

For some of the things I buy, I prefer just doing online, because it's often not easy to figure out where one particular thing is in the store. But when I have time, I do enjoy browsing in the store and discovering new things to buy that I never thought of before.

Home delivery in the U.S. is expensive because the labor cost is expensive, and because population is generally more spread out geographically. Cities in China and India have home delivery with much lower cost. But with the advance of robot technology, maybe not too far in future home delivery in U.S. could have lower cost too.