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Comment by talon8635 | Hacker News Reader

Good thing it’s a completely unnecessary service.

Its definitely a luxury service but often luxuries like this really improve quality of life, especially of people who aren't able bodied like elderly or disabled folks. Its helpful to think of them as the customer base in addition to the "tech person with money to burn who doesn't want to hop in their car" we often default to.

I feel like this is way more true of Instacart. Ordering takeout is just not that necessary.

You have to have surplus money to burn to pay outrageous fees for something you could otherwise do for yourself—I know the story you’re selling about disabled geriatrics, but these companies wouldn’t be worth what they are worth if those were the majority of users. This is normie laziness.

It's fantastic when I travel. I usually book a hotel or AirBnB with a kitchen and then use instacart. I don't like the constant eating out when traveling and this has significantly improved the quality of vacations.

I'm sure it's fantastic, but "It improves the quality of my vacations" is still very much in line with "completely unnecessary"

I live in the US - no car. No grocery store close by. Only real option is to use an Uber which is more expensive than using DoorDash.

Utterly alien to me to pay to have someone shop your groceries and deliver them. I enjoy walking the supermarket/costco and poking around and buying what I need. The thought of paying 30% more AND lose that as well is a nonstarter.

The really are whole different worlds out there!

My context for use was me getting home, getting some dish ready that night, and realizing I forgot some key ingredient. I didn't want to take the time to drive back to the grocery, so I use Instacart to deliver 1-4 items for me instead.

I can't really imagine doing more than that. I did hear stories of coworkers using instacart in COVID lockdown era, but that was clearly exceptional circumstances.

So is Uber, AirBnb, McDonalds, and plenty of other billion dollar companies with externalities that negatively effect society.

You can't assign blame to those businesses. If you must, then your blame should be directed at the consumers.

Unless of course these "negative externalities" are secret and unknown to the consumer... which I'd doubt.

Right.

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