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A comment on The Same-Day War: Amazon, Google And Walmart Race To Bring Your Groceries.

Re:The Same-Day War: Amazon, Google And Walmart Race To Brin... by joesmo on Thursday April 17, 2014 @01:06AM (#7602079)
It's hardly a race anymore. Home delivery of groceries has been around for about a decade now. Webvan may have been a spectacular failure, but they're hardly even worth mentioning. Many supermarkets offer it and Instacart has really perfected the art. It doesn't come without downsides, however. The price markup is one. The bigger downside, IMO, is the lack of variety. Instacart has pretty good variety and multiple stores to choose from, but it still doesn't even come close to visiting one supermarket. Hopefully someone will figure this problem out.
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Re:The Same-Day War: Amazon, Google And Walmart Race To Brin... by r00fus on Thursday April 17, 2014 @02:36AM (#7602260)
Some other downsides:

(1) Store gets to guess on what to do if your item isn't actually in stock - you can provide a bit of guidance, but sometimes the replacement is bad.

(2) Sometimes groceries get delivered with really aggressive sell-by dates (like one lb of ham slices that's got 3 days of shelf life left)... happened on a Safeway delivery.

(3) Occasionally I thought I clicked through and didn't, and other times one of my credit cards has a hold (fraud alert) or has been cancelled (thanks Target!) and the account still has it. (this happened a couple times with Google because they don't charge your card until your delivery is on the road).

Strangely I haven't noticed a significant price increase vs. shopping at stores.

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Re:The Same-Day War: Amazon, Google And Walmart Race To Brin... by joesmo on Thursday April 17, 2014 @03:18PM (#7605719)
For #1, I usually just do no replacements unless I definitely would want either the first choice or replacement. It also depends on who does deliveries. When I got Safeway delivery directly, it was messed up all the time by the shoppers (probably the biggest downside with some services), but Instacart was generally very good about following my preferences. Of course, with no replacements, you might end up without some important ingredients so that can definitely be a problem still.
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