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Re:Would subscription based grocery ever work? by PaulHoule on Friday July 07, 2023 @09:36AM (#36631550)
My wife would emphasize this: if you are shopping for produce you want to choose products that are good quality on a given day and individual instances of those products that are better than average. If somebody else is picking there are agency problems.

Now we do have the problem that we struggle to find the time for grocery trips (ag work keeps my wife busy from sunrise to sundown.) Seems to me that a highly personalized delivery service backed by a full-service grocery that links your in-store experience to deliveries that you get could be a good idea, with regular deliveries approximating a “subscription” the economics would improve, overhead for $300 of groceries would not be much more than $30 and in our case we could tolerate deliveries coming in at a time that is cost-effective for the supermarket.

Re:Would subscription based grocery ever work? by askmany on Friday July 07, 2023 @09:39AM (#36631582)
Yeah basically what subscription model would do is , that it would cut down on advertisement expenses and that expense saved could be given out to customers.
Re:Would subscription based grocery ever work? by PaulHoule on Friday July 07, 2023 @09:45AM (#36631674)
People in my town started this company

https://www.rosieapp.com/

which got bought by instacart that applied recommendation technology to automatically fill out orders for grocery, the idea is that the problem of filling up a complete order for a week worth of groceries is hard online. In our area it was backed by an independent grocery store that serves as a kind of “startup accelerator” for food-related business.

Re:Would subscription based grocery ever work? by askmany on Friday July 07, 2023 @10:08AM (#36632013)
its more like an e-commerce website builder
Re:Would subscription based grocery ever work? by PaulHoule on Friday July 07, 2023 @11:13AM (#36632957)
For a very complex case! That is, a supermarket has thousands of products, prices changing all the time, complex promotions, and potentially orders with 20-50 products in them!