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Comment by samstave | Hacker News Reader

When I had Safeway deliver groceries to me, I noticed that they always selected the more expensive item over anything that was on sale - even when I selected something on sale, they would often claim "item not available, substituted"

I found that my delivered groceries were always more expensive than if I were able to pick out the items myself.

Obviously it will be different for everyone... but I personally dont like delivery for that reason.

Further, if I were amazon owning whole foods -- what I would focus on is minimally packaged items as a product line.

What would the impact to the overall cost of foods be if there were no need to flashy marketing/branding.

Vegetables are cheap in part because we don't need a ton of packaging and marketing around them.

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My grandmother used Safeway's delivery until she passed... What was funny is how many times bread was "out of stock" or similar, or that she got Goat Milk... etc, I don't think she ever got a complete, correct order.

For that matter, the handful of times I've ordered from Prime Now my order has been messed up in one way or another. Amazon keeps pushing the $5 credits for delayed delivery of their main market deliveries, no thank you.

My grocery store has a delivery service. The store is often full of employees dashing through the aisles tossing random crap in their carts to fulfil delivery orders. These guys are being paid minimum wage. I'm not surprised by the high rate of incorrect orders.

That doesn't make sense. The most popular stuff (bread, milk etc) get the most shelf space and most prominent placing, and they also get plenty of order of it. It would take longer to get it wrong than get it right.

They can't just get bread but a specific size/brand. If they don't see immediately they leave. I've had decent luck with whole foods through primenow but I also had good luck with instacart until they lowered wages for the shoppers and tied it more heavily to orders fulfilled per hour. Once that happened all of sudden everything that was heavy was out of order and I'd start getting items that looked vaguely like what I ordered, like bone in chicken instead of boneless

Probably the only way to make this work reliably would be to build dedicated grocery delivery warehouses populated by picking robots.

Something I noticed with my local Kroger delivery service, is that most of the items have a silent markup through the delivery service! So like, maybe tomatoes are 0.69/pound in the store, but the same tomatoes are $1.30/pound through the website. And then I pay a delivery fee on top of that!

Need a blind check:

Craft a delivery order which is specific and identical, then order that from several delivery companies, as well as go in and purchase the order in-store. Rate all the experiences.

Delivery companies need a "silent shopper" -- like how a restaurant will hire people to come in and order and rate the experience.

Costco does this. We were very disappointed. Made it impossible for us to properly price how much we’d pay for the “free” delivery, making it a non-option.

> what I would focus on is minimally packaged items as a product line.

> What would the impact to the overall cost of foods be if there were no need to flashy marketing/branding.

Only a matter of time until the 365 line is rebranded as Amazon Basics.

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