Re:The Same-Day War: Amazon, Google And Walmart Race To Brin...
by mstefanko on Wednesday April 16, 2014 @10:41PM
(#7601778)
In SF I literally walk past a grocery store every day, I enjoy the occasional grocery shopping, but I can't get enough of these services. I work long enough hours that I rarely have time during the week, so that may account for my view point. But I'll say, once you start using one, it's hard to go back. With a company like instacart, if i'm at that point in the week and I don't have what I need to make dinner, instead of getting take out on the regular, I can get what I need dropped off immediately without dropping what I'm doing. With amazonfresh, I no longer need to do a week long or two week long shopping trip. Fresh produce every day. There's way less waste, at least than what I used to go through. I do still see value in the occaisional trip to the grocery store for reasons you mentioned, but when I do stop now, it's fast, and never on one of those extremely busy weekend days where half of the trip is me standing in a line trying not to block the cereal aisle. In addition, there's one major convenience other than getting large amounts of time back, and reducing waste, I can order what I purchased previously. No thought needed, there's enough duplicate items that going through the mundane process of picking up the exact same carton of milk every week, becomes pointless.
This probably would be most useful in locations encompassing food deserts, but of course it looks like they're largely targeting affluent neighborhoods.