From The Wall Street Journal:
Costco Wholesale Corp. is expanding its home delivery services as food becomes an increasingly competitive front in the e-commerce battle.
This week Costco started offering two-day delivery on shelf-stable food from its own website and expanded a fresh-food delivery partnership with Instacart, a startup that delivers groceries from retailers in one day. Both services let Costco members buy food online at lower prices than available under previous options, said Richard Galanti, the company’s chief financial officer.
The moves are a departure for Costco. The company has been slow to embrace online shopping as its members tend to spend more when they visit its cavernous stores.
“At the end of the day we would love you to just come in and buy and take it home,” Mr. Galanti said. But, he added, “we would rather lose it to ourselves” than have other online retailers grab the business. The services should attract new business too, he said.
. . . .
The new Costco.com delivery service, dubbed CostcoGrocery, will offer free shipping on around 500 products for orders of at least $75. Its Instacart partnership will sell around 1,700 grocery products like eggs, meat and fruit, with free same-day delivery on orders of at least $35.
Link to the rest at The Wall Street Journal
PG says it’s a wonderful thing to be a customer when more than one vendor is aggressively competing for your business.
He suspects giant, Costco-sized bundles of paper products, the ones that can fill a grocery cart all by themselves, will generate a lot of delivery orders.
Please, please, nobody tell my wife! I don’t want a traffic jam of 18-wheelers showing up at my door.
Rest easy. The selection seems fairly limited. I ran right over to the site and was disapointed to find that I might be able to get beef bullion paste (local store only carries chicken), but I can’t get the awesome dried bannanas I used to get. And so on. 🙂
I like our monthly shop at Costco, but there are times, in-between, that it’d be nice to have a ‘top-up’ delivery. I wonder if it’s here in Canada yet. 🙂
Tried them this year, wasn’t that much different than Sams, tried a few of the things that were similar but different (like chocolate muffins) and found I liked the Sams ones better. (and Sams takes my Discover card.)
As PG said, it should be interesting to see who tries to do what and how well they do it.