[flavio87]

seems like their executing incredibly well and big congrats to the team. I do wonder a bit how defensible this model is - it seems to me that safeway already has most of the infrastructure available to do deliveries and then could significantly outperform instacart deliveries from safeway in terms of customer experience for example.

- they always know what's in stock in which facility when you order, no more replaced or missing items - they don't charge the high 20-30% markup that instacart charges to their customers

in terms of marketing, they could probably have lower cost of acquisition on scale as well. - they could market their app in-store very aggressively at every single checkout counter.

what Safeway is most obviously lacking is a frontend that's as good as instacarts, but now that instacart has shown how to build it, it should be easy for safeway to build this out.

maybe they don't have their distribution setup such that they could actually deliver within 1-2 hours? what else am I missing? how can this be a defensible business long term?