Try looking in your pantry for anything containing ‘natural flavor’
It includes stuff like fruit candies that obviously have no mushroom powder in the recipe … one literally has to read the ingredients and have a fair idea of the flavor profile one is dealing with, and if the company is inclined to give it an umame boost by adding shroom powder.
You can do this at places like Borders, JC Penny and Best Buy.
But as another poster said, Impulse Buys are the reason why they don’t do this.
Scheduling was another wrench in the works. If you place an order through Peapod or Webvan, you had to be home to receive it unless you could trust your neighbors not to think “Hey! Free food!” when they saw the box next to your front door. This transformed grocery shopping from something you’d do on the way home from work, or at the end of a string of errands on Saturday to something you had to do on schedule.
People hate being bound to someone else’s schedule. It’s one thing to have an errand list of things to do on Saturday, and entirely different to have on your list “Be home between 3:00 and 5:00 for the grocery delivery.”
Work an hour late to get the big project out, or if there’s a long checkout line at the video store, the grocery store will still be there. If you’re late getting home from work and the Webvan guy already came by and left a “missed you” note on the door, now what?
The other nail in the coffin was selection of variable things like meat and produce. Most people are secretly tomato-squeezing fussbudgets at the grocery store, and having to deal with someone else giving you the first four tomatos from the box, regardless of how green/red or how firm or soft was just more than people could cope with.
Isn’t this kind of the premise of warehouse stores like CostCo? Sure they don’t get the stuff for you, but they cheap out on the store as much as possible.
At least one store in my area still offers the order online/get it delivered service.
As I remember from the dotcom era, Webvan built enormous warehouses from which to deliver groceries to a large geographic area. That required a large fixed cost. The alternative grocery delivery model was for the regular supermarket to have someone wander the aisles and assemble your order from the same shelves used by in-store customers. So the fixed cost was less, although the number of “warehouses” was more (since each store functions as a warehouse). Today Webvan is out of business, but supermarket chains still do home delivery using the latter model. I’m not saying that’s the reason for Webvan’s failure, but I think they would need a large number of delivery customers to survive.
As for the delivery issues, I think some of these companies experimented with having a refrigerator in your home or garage accessible to the delivery driver, so the food could be stored immediately.
Oddly enough, the Webvan name lives on, as a unit of Amazon.
If they can’t make it work, nobody will be able to make it work. I’ve been poking around the site, and the quantities are a bit daunting - seems they’re selling a lot of things by the case. I can’t buy one box of breadcrumbs, for example - I’d have to buy 12 8-ounce boxes, but at least the shipping is free on that amount.
IANA professional retail or supply chain expert, but my thoughts are:
As mentioned, this model did work to some extent for medium to large hardware/dry goods, with Sears and JC Pennys, and to a smaller degree with Best Buy order-online-pick up in-store and similar things.
But I suspect for anything smaller than appliances, the crux is that if the customer is going to shlep all the way out to your location, they’re going to want to be able to look at things and pick and choose them. And vice versa, if they’re happy ordering from a (paper or web) catalog, then they’re probably going to prefer to pay a small delivery charge for you to just deliver the stuff to their door rather than having to go to hassle of coming all the way out to your store.
So the ‘order on-line and pick up in-store’ is kind of the worst of both worlds, from a customer point of view. Probably can only really work if there’s a viable retail store to anchor the pick-ups (such as Sears of by-gone days and Best Buy of today).
Is this actually true? I mean, manual labour being cheaper now than, say, 10/20 years ago? I would have thought that the progression of employment laws don’t usually favour the employer, and minimum wages set a floor on your costs.
This is from my perspective in the UK (note the spelling!), is it not true in the US?
Safeway delivers here, and plenty of places offer some form of order online/pickup service, from the local used bookstore (who will run it out to your car for you) to Best Buy (whose pickup service was far slower than just waltzing in).
One “advantage” to this kind of plan is that you might be able to get away from the supermarket unions, which could lower the costs.
Dahu,
yes, in America the cost of manual labor has declined considerably due to immigration (primarily from Mexico) which increased supply of labor and offshoring and mechanization, which decreased the demand. Further, immigration also meant competition from people accustomed to lower living standards and able to maintain them sometimes illegally, e.g. by illegally living in more crowded housing than allowed by zoning regulations. Well, long story short, salaries went down and you would be lucky nowadays to actually have the job with that salary in the first place.
Actually Wally is doing it with Site to Store/Wally.com. (It’s not grocery as much as other things like toys, electronics). You can order things online, get it shipped to a certain store that you shop at or at home.
That’s a lot of what I’m dealing with now at work and so far, most of the customers love it. (I’m not shilling, trust me 
I ran all day today getting packages for people.)
I would say 3 out of 4 customers tell me how much they like it.
I wouldn’t buy food (well, maybe canned) like that myself, though. I don’t squeeze every melon, but I do want to see it.
Btw? My feet hurt!
Any other Canadians remember Consumers’ Distributing? It was a catalog store with mall outlets: you went there, picked something out of the catalogue or looked at the samples, then filled out a form and they went to get it in the warehouse. I seem to recall that Brewers’ Retail worked that way as well; I remember my father taking me in there when I was a kid. Fill out the order slip and they send it out to you on the rollers.
But Brewers Retail switched to a regular layout where the customers pick things off the selves, and Consumers’ Distributing is no more. Essentially, it’s as kunilou described: the customers do the work.
Now, delivery services? There was one around here for a while. Don’t remember what it was called.
I remember that some grocery stores had a roller system after the checkouts where you would put your paid-for stuff in containers and it would go to a pick-up area with a drive-thru, but that was on the way out years ago and I don’t remember seeing it in use.
I just read an article that people here are tending to shop smaller and more often, just one shopping bag on the way home from work kind of thing, the direct opposite of bulk delivery.
I was expecting that the Valu-Mart across from my apartment would go out of business when they built the big new 24-hour Sobeys 15 minutes walk away, but that was five years ago and Valu-Mart is still here. That five-minute convenience trumps all sorts of things. I go to Valu-Mart at least ten times as often as I go to Sobeys.
One notes that Consumers Distributing, Argos, etc don’t/didn’t deal in food. Which is a different realm than non-perishables - jewelery, toys, appliances, etc. If it’s all in the back, instead of in the store, you can’t check freshness, ripeness, etc - you have to trust the sell-by date and the clerk.
The Boston area still has at least one of those in use at a major supermarket. It is called “bundle pickup” and your groceries get sent to the lower level of the store on a belt for you to pick up after you pay for them in a heated garage. It is a large supermarket but it is in a very congested area where parking is limited and there isn’t an easy way to move shopping carts in and out of the store or around the parking lot so they do it that way.
There’s a store in Los Angeles (two areas only, West Hollywood and Venice) that does the delivery thing - in less than an hour.
Too bad it’s so limited in delivery area.
I wish, wish, wish that we had a grocery store with home delivery. Yes, I would trust them to pick out meats and veggies for me (the bulk of our purchases), because if they don’t do a good job of it, then they’ll fail (and I’ll have to get stuff myself again).
There’s no reason to have people running and picking things off of shelves for delivery. There are automated systems that have been doing that type of work for ages.
Ugh. Christmas in Mexico this year. No 100% getting everything from the internet this year.
I don’t think it’s quite that simple. Grocery products vary tremendously in size and shape, so I think the automation process would not be easy. Amazon runs giant warehouses doing something similar, and they do so using people running and picking things off of shelves for delivery. And actually, Netflix’s warehouses do as well, and if it were that easy, they would have automated their processes as well (given the uniform size and shape of DVDs).
This is almost certainly not true for “America.” It may possibly be true for particular localities in particular businesses, but it won’t be true everywhere because there simply aren’t sufficient immigrants in all places to have this effect.
Manual labor is also not a single thing, as you suggest. The laborers that would work in the types of settings we’ve been discussing are highly unlikely to be illegal Mexican immigrants because literacy is a primary skill when picking out groceries or other consumer goods. Wal-Mart has been accused of using illegal labor, for example, but in their janitorial staffs, not as stock clerks.
Further, the fact that workers would choose to come to America and work for minimum wage or less and put up with illegal housing must have an economic reason. That reason is that comparative labor costs even for the lowest workers in America are higher than they are in their countries of origin. That of course also accounts for the manufacturing jobs that have left the U.S. Labor costs, no matter how low by historic American standards (and the minimum wage in constant dollars is at a half century low, which has nothing to do with immigration or illegals), are a huge factor in the thinking of every company.
The recession is changing those factors to a certain degree. Here’s one of dozens of articles on the phenomenon of Reverse Remittances: More Mexicans Sending Money to U.S.. That also means With fewer jobs, fewer illegal immigrants.
You’re using code words rather than realities. Nothing of what you claimed has ever been true on the large scale, rather than for a small fraction of the economy, and even that fraction as seen a large shift in the past two years.