Safeway has had on line ordering and home delivery in the Gay Frisco area for a few years.
One of our small premium grocery stores about over a decade ago, allowed key customers to order by fax and to pick up the order when it was ready. Then, they started free delivery, if the order was over a certain amount. Later, you could email your nearest store.
The same store allowed select customers order the fixings for a complete Thanksgiving, Easter, Christmas, birthday dinner or whatever. They would deliver or have your order ready to pickup at a certain time. They probably did a better job of selecting the produce and meat than most customers.
Now many stores will deliver a complete and cooked Thanksgiving, Easter, Christmas, birthday/special dinner.
A few years later at the same store, key customers could order by email and charge the orders to a key customer charge acct..
They, also, allowed those key customers to email or fax orders to the delis in their stores to pick up on the way home from work. That worked great at their headquarter store. It didn’t at our local store due to a hostile anti customer lesbo in charge of the deli. It wanted to close down her deli at about 5:30 pm. After a few discussions with the family owners, the hostile one got an early retirement.
The fax, email, and phone in Deli orders for after work soon exceeded the rest of the normal deli business, which didn’t decrease with the off store ordering.
Most of our working adult children, nephew/nieces hate any store shopping. Many use Safeway or a grocery store that delivers or has orders ready to pick up.
We still enjoy grocery shopping at stores with good products and good people. That may change when we get older.
Many or our same age friends want to stay in their homes/not move to a retirement home. They like to cook and hate to shop. So, they order from stores that deliver. More on this increasing market, below.
As the boomers enter into our basic age group, 65-80, we will see many of them opting for home delivery or store pickup after ordering on line.
These changes are not sinful, lazy nor evil. They reflect what our changing demographics and lifestyles are asking for. The businesses, which ignore these changes will be like Kmart, Wards and other dodo birds businesses. The business which meet these changes will survive.
I think we should stop all changes in technology and discourage people from seeking re-training. Then we can all sit back and be comfortable when nothing changes.
Cute idea - we’ll send our robots to do the shopping...
Amazon has come up with some great ideas over the years, It seems like every year they come out with some new idea or store, the only problem is you only hear about these new stores and idea. I’m still waiting to see those drones, and the local Amazon book stores, I will probably never ever see them, I don’t live in a big city. My gut feeling is that they only push these new ideas just enough to keep the big money bag investors in their pockets, and keep their stock prices inflated. Personally I don’t expect them to build only 2 or 3 of these stores and the items will be overpriced, not like their web site, I suspect that in these stores instead of having cashiers, they will have problem solvers you will never see in the cute videos that will be busy correcting what gets screwed up in the process.