The post checkout future is delivery from robotic warehouses with ordering systems that predicts your weekly shop. I have hardly been to a grocery store for years, and some weeks I don't bother logging in to adjust my order.

Isn't this kind of risky though? Do you ever get bad produce or damaged goods?

If I get anything bad they refund it no questions asked, but it's exceedingly rare. In ~4-5 years of weekly deliveries the worst damage I've had have been a couple of incidents of things like yoghurt pots etc. with thin film tops that have accidentally gotten pierced. I think if I ordered lots of produce I might consider doing that via one of the specialist delivery options, but it's never been a problem for me.

The biggest "risk" for my use has been that Ocado's predictive pre-filling of my weekly order is just good enough that I've gotten complacent about checking the orders, but it's not quite perfect, so if I miss the deadline, I might occasionally get stuff I didn't need (this is optional functionality - you can just place orders when you need them too and you can tweak what is included to have more control).

Ocado, the company in question is licensing various parts of their tech stack. E.g. in the US they've licensed to Kroger (which also took a 5% stake): https://www.businessinsider.com/ocado-kroger-amazon-online-g...

Between that, and the option of (more expensive) rapid deliveries from takeaway delivery companies like Deliveroo, or from the multiple different 15-minute grocery delivery companies, grocery stores just seems like a nuisance to me at this point. Of course my judgement is influenced by the fact that I don't have a car so not needing to drag shopping on foot or bus makes the leap in convenience far more significant than for a lot of people.

Why would they buy whole foods if they're just going to sell their competitive advantage to their competitors?

Why would they invest in such great infrastructure for amazon.com if they're just going to sell that infrastructure to competitors?

Because they make more money selling ads than they do selling their own products? Can't sell the ads unless merchants are using the marketplace though. Whole foods isn't necessary to sell the camera tech to competitors.

Is that even true though? I thought they frequently copied merchants’ products as Amazon Basics if they were selling well? Because if that’s true, it means they’d rather have the business themselves than advertise for someone else (at least in some categories).

Or they incentivize/empower teams to find revenue without an overarching strategy, and then periodically rationalize what they have.