Sure, I’m gonna let an over-worked warehouse employee pick out my produce, but it in a dirty van, and let it wilt in the back while the driver has to make 200 stops. Yum!
Have people learned nothing about amazons business model?
Undercut competition at a loss to kill competition and strengthen market dominance. Once step one has worked proceed to raise prices and provide shittier service, cut business cost, fuck over workers and customers alike.
If it’s cheaper right now, it wont be for long.
Amazon: copying answers from Walmart
I don’t like this change (maybe I’m getting old), but it will be interesting to see the economics of this change. I wonder if this can be cheaper than grocery stores, but my gut feeling is that the store would be cheaper.
The food is coming from grocery stores, mostly the Whole Foods Market that Amazon bought over five years ago. So one is paying regular grocery store prices and a delivery charge (Prime membership or straight cash).
It cannot be cheaper than grocery stores, one has to keep food somewhere with all associated costs of that and add the extra costs for the logistics of delivery to individual homes.
I am not as certain as you
About what specifically? I am curious genuinely. Food distribution is messed up and can surely be done better. It is a very difficult space to innovate in however. So always interested in different perspectives
It might turn out that delivery is more efficient in some way. Maybe it cuts out the expensive real estate that grocery stores need or something like that.
I wouldn’t like it either way. I prefer to go to a store and look at the product, not scroll through some algorithm driven list of perfect product photos.
Oh thanks for following up. That’s one thing I like about Lemmy. Sometimes a thread can turn into a real discussion.
I see your point that direct-to-door delivery of groceries could theoretically be cheaper. The current Amazon model of basing more and more of their food delivery through Whole Foods exists because it builds on existing infrastructure that is proven to work.
There are smaller grocery delivery services that do direct delivery with no public storefront. One I know of is in Colorado called pinemelon.com. They are essentially a direct distributor for farms in the region. It is a bit expensive, partly by their choice as they are clearly going for the posh end of the market, as Whole Foods first did. (WFM is on par with most major chains for basic foods like produce. They still have costly nibbles, but they had to make basic food items more competitive to gain more market share.)
Food is complicated and I think Amazon is very quickly going to discover that they suck at it. Why? Because Amazon constitutionally hates human beings. It’s in their DNA as a corporate entity.
This shows in the horrific conditions in their non-food warehouses. Yet food is a very human thing. When a dear friend breaks an awesome brownie in half to share with you, it is going to taste better than an identical brownie that arrives in your mailbox.
So I think we agree quite closely. Food is for humans to see and share.
Personally I’m not interested. I get this might be a great service for those that need it, but it’s not for me. Every time I’ve used one of these delivery shopping services I’ve received substandard produce that went bad within a day. Also I hate Amazon and enjoy doing my own shopping.
