From Forbes:
You’ve been traveling for two weeks and can’t remember what it was like to sleep in your own bed, let alone what was in the refrigerator before you left town. Waiting to board your flight home, you jump to the Amazon Prime Now app on your smartphone. Your mind races with thoughts of a grass-fed steak greeting you when you arrive home later that evening. Tap, tap, you select an entrée. Tap, tap, add an accompanying side vegetable or two, plus a bottle of your favorite wine. A final tap for a chocolate dessert. You hit “Submit” and amble down the jetway to board your flight.
This scenario would have been nothing but a thought experiment until recently. But recent developments — especially Amazon’s purchase of Whole Foods Market — are opening up a new world of online grocery delivery options. John Elstrott, the former long-time chairman of Whole Foods’ board believes that the combination of Amazon’s tech know-how with Whole Foods’ connection to discriminating consumers will give the merged powerhouse a 10-year lead on its competitors in online grocery delivery.
. . . .
For any food retailer to survive, they’ll need an online strategy combined with bricks and mortar. The physical store is where you can showcase the quality of your food. The physical stores become delivery and click-and-collect hubs. I think you’ll see the size of stores shrink over time, with less space devoted to the center store and the non-perishables. More of that is going to move online. You’ll also see meal-kit strategies evolve as part of online delivery service.
. . . .
Amazon obviously wants to dominate all sectors of retail as much as it can. They know that people shop for groceries more frequently than they shop for anything else. Walmart realizes the same thing. That’s why Walmart has been very aggressive in the grocery business. If you’re Target, Walmart, Whole Foods or Amazon, food is a leading way to get shoppers to shop. When they go online to shop for food, they end up buying other items as well.
Link to the rest at Forbes and thanks to R. for the tip.
Driving there, finding a parking space without hitting a texting pedestrian whose children have no sense of self-preservation, getting a cart that feels and sounds like a rolling jackhammer, negotiating through areas of expensive and on-the-verge-of-spoiling fruits and vegetables, forcing oneself–or failing–to ignore the siren sugar call of the bakery, handling sticky packages of meat and unable to find a not-empty box of sanitary wipes, getting past other carts up and down and up and down a football field of aisles of too many choices to find the one particular thing you need and then back again when you realize the sadist managers have moved it to a different aisle, standing there in the middle of so much of the wrong stuff and staring at the hole in the display where the item you need is completely sold out, recalculating what you can remember of your pantry because you need to change your menu, retracing your steps as needed, standing in a seven-deep line as a customer ahead of you argues a fifty-cent price difference while the tops of your carrots visibly wilt, moving everything to the checkout conveyor, bagging it up, figuring out what the mumbling bored checkout kid is saying, getting all the bags into the cart, and then out to the car through blazing heat or shot with icy sleet, trying to avoid the backing-up SUV that has decided it is up to you to look out for him, and not him for you, loading bags that are heavier by the minute into the car, pushing the cart halfway down the lot into other carts in the overstuffed cart corral, avoiding getting hit by a texting driver going too fast while on the way back to the car, negotiating still more parking lot people and drivers to make it back out to the highway home, schlepping all the heavy bags into the kitchen, where the items are once again moved, this time into cabinets, pantry, and fridge and freezer, by which time all you want to do is collapse, pour a glass of cheap wine and order a pizza online. Oh yeah, those grocery shopping days. Then I discovered Peapod, and am nevvah, nevvah looking back.
Sounds familiar, Meg.
My grandfather and my dad, to a lesser extent, had a weekly route, selling whatever was salable from the farm. Potatoes, eggs, carrots, onions, eggs, woven baskets, anything that would sell. When refrigeration kicked in, selling milk to the dairy coop became more profitable. The route diminished as selling to the coop brought in more cash. By the mid-60s, the route was gone, replaced by a tanker pulling in every other day to load up a ton or two of milk. How things change.
Unavoidable.
“Customer Convenience” is, like “added value” a moving target. Times change. People change.
Today’s guaranteed winner is tomorrow’s roadkill.
It wasn’t that long ago that Supermarkets were the ultimate in convenience: not sitting at home waiting on the delivery man, who might be late or home sick, (only feasible in single earner dual parent households) no running around to four different shops. One trip every week or three, two hours at mosg. What a time saver!
Fast forward a few decades and Fast Food and Convenience stores rose up so harried workers could do flyby shopping. Much faster but more expensive.
Time is money.
So now online offers time and effort savings and, in some cases, money savings too. The new surefire winner.
For a while.
The only guaranteed certainty is more change.
As long as a society is alive there will be change.
Adapt or die is not just for the business world.
The Walmart SuperStore with the self-checkout captured all my business.
But, for eggs, butter, milk, juice, doughnuts, and fresh produce, they had a better system in Chicago in days long gone by. The milkman put milk, butter and eggs on the back porch. The juice man did the same. Then the produce guy drove his truck down the alleys, and the women came out and haggled with him for what they wanted.
Cap it off with the doughnut guy who drove his truck down the alleys with fresh doughnuts and rolls. After the food, the knife sharpening guy pushed an amazing cart of jury-rigged grinding stones. Last came the guy singing out, “Rags and Old Iron!” He paid pennies for bags of rags and pieces of scrap metal.
Rounding out our mental health was the DDT truck which all the kids would chase as it also rumbled down the alleys spewing clouds of death to mosquitoes .
It was a steady stream of trucks, all travelling north, going down one alley after another. What did they all have in common? They made it easy for the consumer.
We now use Walmart Grocery Pickup exclusively. It’s basically given us back an hour of our week.
For the fresh stuff yeah, for shelf/canned/tp not so much.
As for Walmart, Sams has better meats, H.E.B. down here has better fresh vegetables/meats & seafood (crab legs were on sale last week! 😉 )