Hacker News Reader

Comment by drankula3 | Hacker News Reader

> ...[grocery stores] choose to uphold their brand images

I'm not entirely convinced of this. ALDI grew and became popular because there was no fluff, just a limited line of cheap products sold efficiently in a store with a layout designed for efficiency. Now they are rearranging stores to be like everything else, creating "sales" to get people with poor impulse control to buy, and pushing their image of being the best "deal" while upping the price of their increasingly varied produce. They might be selling off their brand slower than manufacturers did, but the slow brand decay seems to be happening to me.

View on HN

If Amazon can deliver food for cheaper than ALDI it will take off. Delivery is great in cities where driving and parking to shop are a pain.

it’s probably impossible for amazon to actually deliver cheaper rather than accounting for the costs in a way that might make it appear so. last-mile logistics is expensive and can’t compare to the outsourced logistics model employed by traditional groceries.

instead, amazon will rely on other revenue sources (e.g, manufacturer incentives) and shopper analytics to eke out slim margins on greater volumes (economies of scale and all that) that groceries will have trouble competing with.

I don't know about that, the UK has a completely online supermarket that ships out of a giant warehouse. Amazon can easily do the same in major metros.

In theory yes, in practice Amazon has a lot of catching up to do.

I don't know about the situation in the US, but by now every big food retailer in Germany has a delivery service, ALDI included.

These food retailers already have all the supply&logistics in place due to their physical stores, the delivery business is just an extension, all of it often heavily sourcing from local producers. In the long run, these companies can shift their main business to deliveries, turning their retail stores into mixtures of store and distribution center.

In that context, I don't see how Amazon will easily be in a position to get similar products, at similar prices, without having at least some physical retail presence. They got the logistics down, no doubt about that, but I think in terms of actually sourcing fresh, and local, produce the established food retailers have quite an edge on Amazon.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com