Do you really think that ordering something online from the comfort of your couch, in your underwear, is so inconvenient that you need a magic button to press when you run out of laundry detergent? You buy the big jug of high-efficiency stuff that's good for something like 100 loads, that means you need new detergent what, 5 times a year?

Or are you just being hyperbolic?

I don't know about you, but I make a trip to the grocery store about 1.5x every week anyways. I definitely would never use an online food/grocery service; I prefer to see the lettuce I'm buying when I take it off the shelf.

So, given that I'm already at the grocery store something like 80 times a year, and assuming I need to buy more laundry detergent 5 times a year, that's 16 opportunities for me to not pay Amazon shipping and just pick up a jug of detergent when I'm going to be out shopping anyways.

Assuming this isn't an April 1 joke and I just got trolled, hard, this is definitely a solution in search of a problem.

The future is gonna happen whether you're a part of it or not.

So are marketing gimmicks that masquerade as conveniences.

What's your point? Neither of us knows which products are here to stay and which aren't.

Nail on the head.

I'm at the grocery store approximately zero times a year. For me a "summon cat litter" button would be a marked improvement in my life.

Interesting. Do you order groceries online or something?

If so, what happens when, say, your apples come bruised?

> If so, what happens when, say, your apples come bruised?

Me: these apples are bruised

Tesco man: sorry sir, let me refund that straight away. And keep the apples, you could make a pie with them.

Though in five years of online grocery shopping I've only returned a couple of items. The apples have made it all the way unbruised from New Zealand after all, four more miles is nothing.

So in other words, if your apples show up bruised, you're still stuck with bruised apples? And then you have to wait for the new unbruised ones to arrive?

That sounds like a much worse experience than simply going to the market and picking out unbruised apples.

Do you really think that getting a few bruised apples once or twice a year, if that, and keeping them for free when this happens until the replacement comes, is so unacceptable that you need to be going to the grocery store each and every time to handpick and carry carefully your apples back home?

Or are you just being hyperbolic?

Are you asking if I'd rather pay less and get quality fruit every time, or pay more and potentially not get quality fruit every time?

Tough call, but I guess I'd rather pay less and get quality fruit every time.

Shopping takes maximum 45 minutes and I like browsing the different cuts of meat at the market and/or my local butcher.

You tell them, and they refund you, and they look into their operations and figure out how they let bruised apples slip into a customer's order so the problem can be remedied.

But you're still left with bruised apples.

Had you gone to the market you would not have bruised apples.

I value my time more than I value not experiencing the pathetically infinitesimal trauma of the occasional bruised apple (something I experienced not once in the 6 years I lived in Santa Clara and had 100% of my groceries delivered).

And yet somehow, FreshDirect's managed to stay in business since 2002.

When the options are taking the L to Whole Foods vs ordering Fresh Direct, both options suck. Fresh Direct just sucks slightly less.

This is relatively common in the UK. Online grocery shopping is very much mainstream. All of the major supermarkets offer it, plus Ocado which is online only (and the best).

For the Ocado-deprived, the main feature that makes me stick with Ocado is that when I forget to make an order, they pick a set of products based on my purchase history, and delivery it at my usual fixed weekly slot anyway.

It is predictable enough (and with options for "always include" and "never automatically include") that we quite often don't bother adjusting the order.

My grocery shopping have never been less stressful.

We've been using Ocado for the last few weeks as my wife was finding it too much hassle to go to the supermarket with a toddler. It's freed up a lot of time and the service and quality has been excellent.

I hadn't noticed that they help you to remember your order and try to deliver what you normally have. Is this automatic then. What happens if you are out of the country for a couple of weeks?

Is this kind of service not common in the US then? It seems to be massive in the UK now.

Every single invention in the human history has been about making things easy. Including the very invention of the wheel itself.

Did the early humans really need wheels, when they were already fit enough to run and carry weights?

I don't need it. But I'd like to have a dozen or so of them spread around the house near wherever I'm likely to notice I'm out of something.

You may make a trip to the grocery store about 1.5x every week, but I "never" go to the grocery store any more - it's all delivered. I can not imagine going back to shopping in person other than the odd "emergency" purchase.

More importantly to cover the various other uses I could see for this, such as printer toner, just the grocery store would be insufficient.

This is a solution in search of a different demographics than you. Like me.

> Do you really think that ordering something online from the comfort of your couch, in your underwear, is so inconvenient that you need a magic button to press when you run out of laundry detergent?

Maybe that's your daily pattern, but for example in my case, this almost never happens. I just don't sit on my couch thinking about home maintenance; I have too much other, more interesting stuff to do. Phones have really annoying, user-hostile UI, so I don't even use mine much at home. They are good enough for commuting, when I can't really do anything else except maybe read a book, so I schedule tasks I can do from my spartphone for the to/from-work route.

It's mildly convenient. There's nothing wrong with mild conveniences, of course. I love them! But I don't see the point in mild conveniences for something you do 20-30 times a year when it requires dedicated hardware.

If the use case was something like, push this button and dinner arrives, I'd say it's fantastic. If it was something like, push this button on your phone to re-order detergent, I'd say that's pretty sensible. But a physical button to order an infrequently ordered product makes no sense to me.

Even when the price of a physical button is $0?

Even for Amazon it's cheap, and quickly pays for itself.

The line between physical and digital is blurring more every day.

Half of those steps would be eliminated if Amazon would simply add a "favorites" or "regular items" panel to their mobile app, where all the "buttons" for the items you regularly need would be displayed, and you could just tap on one to re-order it. Given the fact that people almost always have their smartphone with them now, having a separate external button for every product is ridiculously redundant.

The time I'm least likely to have my phone with me is when doing things like starting the laundry, or starting the dishwasher, or grabbing the last soda in the fridge, or similar stuff around the house, where I may have left the phone somewhere else in the house.

Pretty much every other time the phone will be in my pocket and the value would be less. But even then it'd mean fishing my phone out, unlocking, starting an app instead of just pushing a button. Not torture by any means, but if I can just stick a button there and not have to think about it again, then awesome.