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Amazon to Launch Online Grocery Store
Aryabhata writes "It might sound like a bad flashback to the dot-com days, but news is that Amazon is planning to test the waters with an old idea; the online grocery store!. To its defense Amazon is only attempting this with nonperishables like peanut butter, potato chips, and canned soup implying that there's no refrigeration required--ordinary warehouse shelves will do fine."
They could make money selling hard to find items, but not stuff that you can buy anywhere. There are a few things I can not buy locally that I would order if they had it, but I won't buy potato chips from them...
Of course, if this works then I should invest in UPS & FedEx...
Finally I can buy a 24 pack of dish detergent AND get free shipping!
I mean, ok. When I order a book and find out there's a movie about this book, maybe I order it as well (or the other way 'round). When I order a computer game based on a movie, it makes sense to try to bundle it with the movie (or a "collector's edition" of the DVDs).
Now where does peanut butter come into play? I mean, I somehow CAN see certain porn movies and peanut butter, but it's not really the thing that comes to my mind when I start browsing Amazon. Where's the synergies? When did it happen to you the last time that you wanted to buy a book and realized "Hey, I also need noodles!"?
Books, movies, games, makes sense. Groceries just don't fit into the fold.
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Amazon already also has partnerships where they set up transactions with other businesses (e.g., their whole used-book system). In some places (e.g., Boston) grocery chains are still doing online orders and deliveries. (It has a reasonable ROI if you already have the food storage; delivery people and a web site to get the segment of the market that just wants food to show up.) So the next step is for Amazon, after you've specified your location, to offer fresh food if they've got a partner in the area. I don't see it leading to a loss for either business, relative to the status quo, so it's a perfectly plausible move.
I really don't think this makes sense.
If there's one type of goods which I would like to order online and have delivered to my door, it is bulk goods. A box of 12 1L cartons of orange juice; a dozen 2L bottles of diet coke; a 4 kg box of laundry detergent. These can sit on my shelves for months, but they're bulky, heavy, and generally annoying to handle. I'm doubt I'll ever buy tonight's dinner from an online grocery store, but I would be very happy to buy next month's laundry detergent.
Unfortunately, the very nature of these goods which makes me want to order them online and have them delivered makes them impractical for a company like Amazon to handle. Products like this tend to be are at the very low end of the $/kg scale; they are exactly the sort of products which need to be shipped in large quantities to local warehouses and then delivered locally -- not packaged into individual deliveries at a central warehouse and then shipped separately halfway across the country.
The reason an online bookstore works so well is that the book market is characterized by low turnover, high profit margins, and high $/kg ratios. Grocery stores have high turnover, low profit margins, and low $/kg ratios. Trying to apply a solution designed for bookstores to the grocery store area simply won't work.
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Remarkable. You're comparing a company that delivers to a very, very small area of the country to a multinational company that ships just about anywhere.
What precisely was the point to your post?
Fresh Direct is popular, and apparently successful, in densely populated neighborhoods like mine in NYC. Even though there are grocery stores sync'ed to the local neighborhood within a few walking blocks, all over the city.
Some competition from Amazon might force down the prices, and produce some new innovations for better service. And it will double the number of doubleparked giant delivery trucks clogging previously residential-only streets that rarely took deliveries.
These delivery services should deliver only after 8PM, when people are at home, and traffic congestion is lighter, and the double/parking has settled down. Getting that setup for residential zones would help make it more obviously better in commercial and mixed zones. Eventually we can have deliveries only between 8PM-6AM, and use the full capacity of our roads, even increasing it by lowering wasteful congestion.
A great combination of efficiency and convenience, at every level.
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I don't see why the size of the country needs to make a difference ... like others, I was surprised that there aren't as many home shopping services in the US as there are in the UK.
Those that work in the UK are based on national supermarket chains, which I'm sure that you have - you just enter your post code & they tell you if they deliver to your area. Then you can join. I'd have thought that there are chains with a big enough coverage area to make it worth while ...
I can't help think that they've been pretty much forced to expand their services while they can.
Even now, if I were to buy a book, I'll just google it and find the amazon link from there. Thats advertisement expense that Amazon is losing right there - more importantly Amazon has stopped being my first resort for book searches though majority of my purchases might be still from there. Amazon would probably want to gain that "first site you go to" share. And if they stick arnd with just books, whereas google offers everything (including Amazon links - which obviously they cant afford to take out), they might start to lose a bit of relevence. And obviously google's plan to scan the worlds books is a very visible threat.
All the stuff that Amazon and (to the best of my knowledge) target sell is prepackaged, isn't it? So even if there are germs all over the boxes, it doesn't do anything to the actual food, does it?
Even if cashiers at grocery stores use disinfectant regularly, there still isn't any guarantee a customer didn't take that food item and get flu germs or worse all over it. I'd be a lot more concerned with what other customers might have done to food than the people working there.
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I wonder if this isn't common across most of Europe. It is at least in Spain.
In addition to internet ordering the major grocery chains in Spain (two of the largest are actually French and German owned) offer other creative options. I for example found I didn't particularly like shopping for groceries online. There were too many things I wanted to see and select in person: fresh fruit and vegetables, meats, cheeses, etc. But I also found I didn't like lugging my groceries home on public transit so I would shop in the store and then have my groceries wheeled back into large coolers to be delivered either same or next day.
Why does this work so well in Europe but seem so rare in the States? It could be because of a significant difference in population density. These sorts of services seem to work well in densely populated areas where cars are less available (or desirable) than in more rural settings. The US has historically had a very disparate population living in primarily rural settings. This seems to be changing as small towns are shrinking as cities grow.
It's success is directly linked to the high density of the population in NYC.
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Dude, if they're touching my peanut butter there is a bigger problem than their failure to wash their hands first.
Nevermind that the behavior of the cashier is essentially for show. If you want to know how "sanitary" your food from Safeway is go at 3 in the morning and watch the shelf stockers.
And of course other customers never touch your food before you buy it, no siree Bob! You might want to start considering your sanitation concerns being, by their very nature, your problem to look after. If you're afraid of catching something from your peanut butter jar wear gloves when you shop and wipe everything down with Vodka before you take them off.
KFG
I would have mentioned the same (most of the major UK supermarkets do delivery) but the US is a very different market, as brought home to me by someone telling me how their nearest Walmart / major town was . . . 50 miles away. What makes the model work so well in the UK is that most of the population live close to an urban centre.
Amazon also love the UK for that - apparently we're one of their best markets because most things get delivered next day.
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That is a nice gimmick.
Have you ever spent any time in the backroom of a supermarket, or a warehouse, or a food manufacturing plant? Obviously not, if you think that it makes any difference whether the cashiers use those wipes.
There is no advantage whatsoever to Safeway over Amazon in this regard.
And please remember to wash off any food container before you open it, wherever you bought it.
great, so that's another source of super-bacteria.
seriously, that type of attitude is a contributor to the problem.
When someone who is NOT sick sneezes, etc the risk of any type of infection spreading is nil. Now there is always the chance someone has something but doesn't know it, and hence it is prudent to take others into consideration. But this attitude of using disinfectants and antibiotic soaps, etc make things worse, not better when they are misapplied.
Me I think companies should do a better job of convincing people who are sick to STAY HOME. I don't care what environment they are in, even if they suppress most of the symptoms they are the ones spreading it to others.
Someone who is sick should NOT be serving the public.
But, if you're overly sensitive, trust me, you don't want to actually know what's in your food.
really.
Every top ten item is a diaper, #11 is Bounty towels which I suppose could be used as diapers, then it is back to diapers again until the fertility test #14 and razors at #15, then it's all diapers and babywipes again to round out the top 20.
t op-sellers/-/grocery/16310211/102-8388649-7401761
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/new-for-you/
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