As someone who lives in Seattle, let me tell you about the service (and Ill even compare it to safe ways delivery service!) You schedule a time, and pick out your groceries. You can attended or non-attended deliveries (Id advise attended), and you can basically order anything from the local area and its reasonably priced. You tip the delivery guy (usually like 5$), and they come to your house and deliver. The review of it is that the produce is hit or miss (most of the time a very big hit, and its usually very good), and most of the stuff is as advertised. The prices are very comparable to stores in the local area, and if you dont have to pay for the delivery fee, can even beat them. In comparison to Safeway's service, it blows it out of the water. My safeway experience has been plagued with bad produce, and out of stock items, with amazon this is never a problem. Most of the same, Amazon can deliver everything the next day, but sometimes it can take 2 days. Its VERY reliable in terms of times that are set (if I say I want between 7-8 in the morning, the dropoff guy is always here during that time.) Overall, I enjoy using it for getting fresh produce delivered to my apartment with little to no hassle. I also have an amazon credit card, and it gives me 3x points on my order (which is better rewards than most rewards card) so that is an added bonus. Im excited if the rest of the country can get the same thing. As someone who moved from Ohio, its a service that I never knew how badly I wanted till I used it.
As an SF resident and hyper-avid grocery delivery user, I welcome our new, Amazonian overlords.<p>I tend to get 1-3 deliveries from Amazon a week, so tacking on groceries to that list would not be a major problem. There's still a question of how you handle perishables like milk though. Plus, I've found that most delivery services tend to be incredibly variable in their produce quality.<p>For those curious about the startups in this area, I did a bit of a writeup where I raced three services head-to-head against each other. <a href="http://teejm.com/the-great-grocery-game" rel="nofollow">http://teejm.com/the-great-grocery-game</a>
Question for those of you who have used this service: how often do you get fresh fruit or vegetables that don't meet your expectations?<p>When I go grocery shopping I agonize over every single item and when something doesn't look fresh I change my dinner plans. I'm not sure I'd be comfortable buying perishable stuff online although I'd love it for dry goods and cans.
Does anybody know if Amazon partners with large grocery chains? Seems to me that if Amazon.com was the last mile delivery/fulfillment service for already existing brick-and-mortar grocery chains, then they wouldn't be competing and maybe the grocery chains might actually go for it?<p>Maybe there is a first mover advantage for a chain who partners with Amazon. They could piggyback the service on top of the grocery chain's existing infrastructure and exploit Amazon's infrastructure and scale at the same time.<p>Maybe that way, the physical grocery stores could still keep their doors open, lower prices, perhaps be reduced in size and become more of a local warehouse.
Given the success of FreshDirect, I really like Amazon's chances at nailing this vertical. After all, they are experts in shipping logistics, managing distributor-relationships, and handling payments/customer service.<p>I trust them to seek out high-quality partners and suppliers, deliver with reliability at low-cost, and make the entire thing as seamless as possible.<p>Will be interesting to see how transparent (or not) they are about their suppliers as it relates to GMO's, etc.<p>This will be a great tie-in and supplement to their "subscribe and save" (usually) non-perishable line of products.
Has anyone from the Seattle area used this service regularly? I'd imagine after 5 years it's become pretty polished. That seems like an eternity to improve their business model and get the economics right.
I wonder how much Amazon (and similar) will effect urban planning in the future. Delivery lets them undercut existing sotres that pay exorbitant rent for storefronts in urban areas. They did this with bookstores, then the general store, and now it seems grocery stores.<p>Think about what remaining businesses are based on locality, but whose margins are eaten by the rent. Car dealerships. Malls (for clothes). Furniture. The uncracked problem with these is you can't easily try/fit the item before buying.<p>If Amazon can somehow solve that...
I hope Amazon is using this to take over last-mile delivery. That would be an amazing opportunity to roll out something like <a href="http://www.cargocap.com/" rel="nofollow">http://www.cargocap.com/</a> - though probably not in a typical US suburb.<p>In a somewhat denser city, doing last-mile delivery by something other than a people-killing, air- and noise-polluting truck just makes a whole lot of sense. I know it's far off but there are few companies other than Amazon that I would trust to pull it off.
Yes dear amazon. Being your Prime member, please let me order grocies online through you and hav them shipped especially for recurring items like Milk, Eggs etc.
Amazon could be very successful if they setup "grocery warehouses" in local areas and just delivered groceries to people. It's not a wildly different model than the current grocery store, just with less need for prime real estate and you'd be paying delivery people instead of checkout people.<p>It can be done and it can be done profitably, it's going to be more about finding people who don't want to spend their time going to the grocery store.