While reading the BBC website regarding the death of the Queen, this article regarding dark stores causing problems in Paris came up.
Wikipedia has this to say about them.
I had never heard of dark stores previously. Having read that wikipedia article raises more questions than it answers.
Why would a store closed to the public be a good business model?
Why would someone prefer to order their grocery delivery from such a store rather than the regular supermarket?
Why are they causing problems that a regular supermarket that offers delivery, pick up outside the store, or using a shopping service like DoorDash wouldn’t?
Walmart and H-E-B (the two major supermarkets here in Corpus Christi) offer those services, and that hasn’t seemed to cause problems. Neither do services like DoorDash or Grubhub. What’s the story behind this? Is it an urban problem caused by lack of parking in city centers?
At a guess I would speculate that the French government is less concerned about the retail aspect of these “dark stores” and more concerned about these ghost kitchens not being attached to a functional restaurant. The French have been known to pass laws about food (such as banning ketchup in schools) and I’d say they just want French people to eat at restaurants or, at the very least, order food from kitchens attached to a restaurant.
Possibly because the wikipedia article describes a slightly different and more narrow concept. These Parisian dark stores certainly aren’t:
not located in the high street or shopping centres, but mostly in areas that are preferred for good road connections.
Starting a dedicated food delivery service is easier than starting a food delivery service and a retail shop.
Perhaps it’s faster. Perhaps there aren’t other delivery options. It could be it’s cheaper. Possibly they are startups being run at a loss to position themselves for a future where this is the only way to shop and they can raise prices and start being profitable.
That’s right there in the article you link to:
But residents of buildings where “dark stores” have replaced pre-existing grocery shops are angry about noise from early morning lorries and the disruption caused by squads of deliverers on electric bicycles and scooters.
City officials - who spent millions to safeguard the high street against out-of-town shopping centres - are worried that the new threat from “quick commerce” will drain life from public spaces and hasten the trend to an “atomised” society of solitary consumers.
Right. But they don’t need to start a retail shop if there’s already a supermarket. They just need to send a shopper to the regular supermarket, like DoorDash does.
I suppose it might save a few minutes to not have to dodge around people if all the aisles are empty, but are grocery deliveries usually that urgent?
Presumably all those early morning lorries and disruptions would be happening if the regular supermarket had those delivery people showing up to pick up groceries to take out for delivery. That’s the part I don’t get. If the regular supermarket offered outside pickup and delivery, the disruptions would be no different, wouldn’t they?
Then they have to pay retail prices and their profit has to come from delivery fees and/or shifting the price up for delivery customers. That’s not the business they are trying to start.
It is when you are paying a salary to the people walking the aisles. You’re also assuming these are rational actors and not businesses trying to create a new market that might never achieve sustainability.
Who says the supermarket that was there offered pickup and delivery, and even if they did it was probably smaller volume than a business dedicated to delivery. But maybe these people are just upset they can no longer walk to their supermarket and do their own shopping. It seems like it’s more plausible they are telling the truth, but I’ll bow out of this and let someone who lives right next to one reply with their detailed traffic statistics pre and post dark store.
I didn’t mean to badger you if that’s how my response came off . I’m sure they have legitimate complaints. I’m just trying to understand the underlying problems. My guess is that this is an urban vs. suburban thing, and that as a suburbanite I don’t have direct experience with the underlying problems.
Do you remember the traditional design for a supermarket? You have the two most commonly bought items (bread and milk) located on the far left and far right corners of the store. Why? Because this means that customers will be forced to go through a number of other aisles to get to them and while doing so will probably see other items they want to purchase. But the opposite is true for a delivery service: you are paying for staff so you want to minimize travel time for staff in the store. A traditional supermarket is also filled with customers: and this delays staff moving around. So there is a significant move to dark stores to handle online orders, not just in France. So higher online order volume areas are gradually moving to the dark store model while low and moderate volumes remain with ordering from stores.
I’m going to guess that there’s an economic issue here–the dark stores are cutting into the profit of the existing regular stores.
The dark store is just the warehouse for an app. It has a much more limited selection than a full grocery store, but the app and the delivery make it more convenient for many people who want to save time. And the prices may be lower than a supermarket.
So–I’m guessing–that lots of people order half of their food from the app. then, instead of going to the supermarket once a week, they only go once a month ( to buy items that the dark store doesn’t carry.)
The supermarket chains are big businesses with political connections.
So, instead of matching low prices , they are lobbying the politicians to shut down their competitors.
Democracy and capitalism at its best.
(All of this post is just my guessing–but this is MPSIMS, so don’t shoot me.)
So is something like Grainger considered a “dark store” in the US? It is just a warehouse used to fulfill on-line mail orders but they do allow you to pick up your orders on “will-call” if you are in a hurry or don’t want to pay shipping.
There are lots of things you can do differently in a dark store than in one that’s open to the public. The pickers probably carry some kind of handheld computer/scanner with them as they’re filling orders, so you don’t need the checkout lanes to scan everything again. You can define the aisles to be one-way, so they’re narrower and you can fit more shelves into the same size store. You don’t need the fancy display of Halloween candy, or whatever the item-of-the-week is.
When it’s your business to pick and ship hundreds, or even thousands of orders, even little things that you can do to optimize the process can be important.
I’ve been reading articles that say these dark shops are becoming huge in India. Their appeal is that they allow for almost instant service; many say that an order will be there in 20 minutes, or even 10. This works as a business model because of the density of Indian cities. People can’t get to and from regular stores that quickly, the relatively small neighborhood stores in India can’t stock as many different items, and prices are higher in them because of economies of scale.
Whenever people compete to be the fastest, though, problems arise, similar to the multiple traffic accidents caused by 30-minute free pizza offers. The delivery people are paid next-to-nothing. The shops may or may not comply with normal regulations. The business model requires high densities and lots of customers so it will only work in certain locations.
Here’s an article that talks about some of these problems in Europe.
It’s always the same story. The internet makes people think both that they can do things faster and that they don’t have to have the old rules. Sooner or later regulation is inevitable.
It can’t be the whole idea that it’s just a warehouse for an online business; there are lots of those that operate in France- it’s got to be something with the local nature of the dark stores being located in what used to be walk-in storefronts, and that’s what it sounds like in the article, with the traffic, bad driver behavior, etc…
If I had to guess, by locating them very close to residential areas, they can economically use scooter drivers and maybe cyclists to deliver small orders extremely rapidly. By re-classifying them as warehouses, they have to be moved to appropriately zoned areas and the delivery time and distance goes way up, making them compete with the Amazons of the world, not with local groceries.
a dark-store is not a store, but a distribution center - and you probably have 100s of bikes/mopeds/scooters/etc… being “nuisance parked” everywhere 24/7 … and also potentially 100s of people that go with them … and they have metabolisms and metabolic by-products …
. I’m sure they have legitimate complaints. I’m just trying to understand the underlying problems. My guess is that this is an urban vs. suburban thing, and that as a suburbanite I don’t have direct experience with the underlying problems.