If you look at the history of the Supermarket, the concept is only about 100 years old - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/King_Kullen

From Ruth Cowan's More Work for Mother: "Butchers, greengrocers, coffee merchants, and bakers employed delivery boys to take order from and then carry purchases back to the homes of their more prosperous customers. Smoked, dried, and pickled fish, fruits and vegetables, second-hand clothing, and linens were routinely sold from pushcarts that lined the curbs and traveled the back alleys of poor neighborhoods."

Yeah same in other big cities, it just shows how incredibly impractical it is to do grocery shopping without a car, and what big demand there is to get rid of this annoying chore. I think it's great! The solution is not walking and cycling, that's for sure.

For me it's not been that it's inconvenient to do it without a car, but that it's inconvenient to do it at all. I used to do my shopping on the way home from work, and the stores were on my way so they added nothing to my travel time, yet they added time spent in shops, and I had no desire to keep doing that when delivery options appeared.

I'm in London, and use Ocado, which means if I can't even be bothered to open the app to decide what to order they'll populate the order for me based on my favourites and my past shops. I know I'll get something that's generally "close enough". When I can be bothered to open the app, I have a starting point that's ~90% right. My weekly shop takes me ~5 minutes.

I can't possibly imagine going back to doing grocery shopping - or pretty much any shopping - myself again. Ever. The exception is the very occasional urge, usually if I'm going for a walk anyway, or want something extra. But even most sudden urges is so much more convenient to handle via Deliveroo or similar.

The big out-of-town supermarkets will die soon enough, and be replaced by warehouses. The shift to deliveries has been steady in the UK at least. Small town centre grocery stores might survive to some extent for that occasionally extra shop.

One less reason to want to own a car for me at least.

> I can't possibly imagine going back to doing grocery shopping

I know, same here, it's so great. I used to have an annoying 30min detour 3 times per week, and now I do my grocery shopping on the phone for 5mins while I'm commuting. The time I save has gone into more cooking, and healthier meals. Delivery is definitely better than using a car. Nobody that already has a full time job should have to put up with such annoying chores.

But delivery services, and services related to house work has a big stigma in northern Europe, people think it's really important that "everyone cleans up their own mess" and you should not be able to "buy your way out". You see CEO:s in companies having kitchen duty doing dishes to get brownie points and you often get very negative reactions to using such services.

It'll change - there are rapidly growing online grocery delivery companies all across Northern Europe too. I think deliveries are very different in terms of cultural acceptance than things like "kitchen duty" which is often more about showing you care about shared spaces, to the point where doing it is often as you say a way of getting brownie points that is cheaper than actually doing something more meaningful.

I started using Instacart in 2013, after few years completely stopped using and any other grocery delivery. The problem is that often the shopper thinks things are “out of stock” if they don’t find them, or they just buy the wrong item. So each delivery you are always stressing about if you get all the items and if the quality of produce is good enough. I’d rather order stuff from Amazon or another web store that only ships when they have the right product at hand.

Personally don’t believe the supermarkets will go away. I don’t think the business model of these delivery platforms allows having qualified staff to do the shopping.

This is rarely a problem with Ocado, which I use. Their stock management is good - they're not picking up from stores but from their own increasingly automated warehouses. Very occasionally they do run out, in which case they ship you substitutes. If you don't want the substitutes they take it back to questions asked, but it means it's rare I get a delivery where stuff is missing and there isn't a viable replacement.

Ocado is increasingly licensing their warehousing platform internationally, so it's likely to show up near you.

I'd agree with you if we were talking about staff picking from a shop floor - that does not work reliably enough at all, but that model is several years outdated and the only reason some of those still survive is that the more automated systems like Ocado's and a few others are a lot more capital intensive to roll out as it means building dedicated specialized warehouses.

This seems to be straying from the topic of the article which was making walkable communities more mass market.

Not to pick on you but this sentiment is that sure I can handle groceries without driving to a store. I’ll just have some gig worker deliver it for me.

Personally I prefer shopping in person anyway. It’s not a big deal once a week and usually have multiple errands to run anyway.

> This seems to be straying from the topic of the article which was making walkable communities more mass market.

I don't agree that it's straying from the topic. The shift towards getting groceries delivered is likely to start to kill off the big out-of-town super markets in certain markets, and it fundamentally changes the dynamics where grocery shopping was a big factor for people living in areas with few walkable shops with respect to their real or perceived need for cars.

E.g. my mums neighbourhood in Norway is one she'd likely have had to move away from when she gets a bit older than now if it wasn't for delivery services. She's close-ish to shops, but not close enough to be comfortable carrying lots of groceries any more. Having delivery services means the neighbourhood remains walkable enough for her for longer.

> Not to pick on you but this sentiment is that sure I can handle groceries without driving to a store. I’ll just have some gig worker deliver it for me.

No, my weekly shop is delivered by salaried drivers. They're not paid great (I've checked), but they're certainly not paid as poorly as the typical gig worker and thankfully they've recently been forced to up salaries to deal with the ongoing lack of delivery drivers in the UK. My very occasional extras via Deliveroo are delivered by gig workers, and I'm conscious they're paid shit so I generally tip heavily.

Personally I utterly hate shopping in person unless it's something that I like to look at, and I'm very happy to pay extra to avoid having to.

But to bring it back to the topic, if having someone deliver groceries takes away the main reason why people otherwise need a car, it's a net win. For me it e.g. makes a big difference in where I'd be prepared to live as I don't need to take into consideration whether it'd be a long walk with heavy bags any more. I enjoy long walks. I don't enjoy long walks with bags full of groceries.

Eh. Living in Beijing without a car, we had a big grocery store near our apartment so a cart was sufficient. There was also a wet market and convenience store downstairs from our complex, while taxis are cheap and plentiful for anything that benefited from a ride out to get.

Back in the states, I shop for groceries daily (again, choosing to live in a semi urban area with two grocery stores in easy walking distance) after dropping the toddler off at daycare. A stroller works wonders. Not sure how I will shop after he starts kindergarten next year.

If delivery happens by the same means you would have been doing it (eg. a car), it adds nothing to the communal or ecological value of a neighbourhood — it's merely a consumer's convenience in saving time.

Only if delivery was organized in a way to deliver to multiple households in the same area does it start to make sense from an ecological perspective: but your neighbourhood still has to have those delivery trucks in the walking/biking paths.

A delivery person will probably not do a roundtrip between the store and your house, just for your groceries. They'll have an optimized route for doing a dozen deliveries at once, and amortize the ecological / social cost across all of them.

It's a bit like a bus vs. a car. They're not equal, even if they both drive on the same roads.

Most of the deliveries take place by bike, at least for the fast delivery sites. For the stores and others, they have trucks that deliver to 20-50 people. So, you replace many cars with a single trip.