Lessons Learned For Grocery Delivery — Just Use Instacart
Executive Summary: Grocery chains are not built for scale to offer delivery or pick-up service for their products. Start your effort with Instacart and avoid the numerous logins and disappointing websites from the store brand. Thanks to Instacart for “Front Ending” the store brand web sites! Store brands should partner with Instacart or a similar vendor and stop trying to offer this as a native service. Store Brands should be able to scale up and scale down delivery or pick-up services as needed. Drone delivery needs to be accelerated for approval to operate in United States Airspace.
Prior to the Coronavirus crisis in March of 2020, I had never given much thought to having groceries delivered to my home. Traditionally I have avoided any type of food delivery including the basics like Pizza. That all changed in March of 2020. In March of 2020, I quickly learned that grocery stores are not ready for large scale food delivery.
In the local town, ordering supplies from the “major” supermarket there presented a number of challenges. Upon selecting the Delivery option you were only presented the current day and the next day. There was never a choice given to select the time. You could never go to “Next Week” as well. “Select Later” put you into the screens to choose your food.
The same issue occurred for the Pick Up option as well.
I am not sure why the organization did not present the option to select a date further out. In my situation, I would have been happy to order and have it delivered at a later time.
At one point during the process, I was able to secure a Pick Up time slot. The process for Pick Up was easy. Upon arrival, the parking lot had a designated spot for you to park in. Once parked you could call or text the store for them to bring your materials out. The team at the store placed the product in the trunk of your vehicle.
Moving on from the local organization, I shifted to the larger regional grocery store brand provider. This brand has a relationship with Peapod and other services. In this instance, the pick-up option was suspended. The delivery option was fairly limited. Here is the artifact denoting that pick-up was suspended.
With pick-up suspended, this brand had clearly invested slightly more in their delivery options. Their website gave a least two weeks of calendar entries to choose from. Most of the entries on the calendar were constantly sold out for the next 2 weeks. It is unclear why the calendar stopped at 2 weeks from now.
The trend continued with various results on the store brand web site to obtain a pick-up or delivery option.
One of the interesting delivery experiences occurred with Whole Foods. After ordering through the Whole Food Component through Amazon, there were no available times. Remaining on the screen and refreshing the window did produce a time slot on the same day for delivery.
After the hours of navigating to the Store Brand web sites for grocery delivery, I discovered that Instacart was the winner. Instacart has a number of available times for delivery and they made the process easier to add products to an existing list in progress. The checkout process provided the ability to add a gratuity as appropriate. The deliveries arrived in good order and well organized in brown bags.
Given my experience with Instacart and the value they provide, I am surprised that Instacart does not have a “surge” pricing model. Writing this in March of 2020, I know that I would be a candidate to pay surge pricing for my items given my situation.
The Instacart delivery model uses the traditional vehicle approach. Perhaps Instacart will consider investing in the drone delivery model. This could take independent drone operators the “Gig” economy to Instacart. This could also help increase the volume that gets delivered from the store to the home users. To get this adoption to take place, Instacart will need to use their resources to get drone, i.e. vertical take-off and lift policies adopted in the United States. Currently, and individual is not going to have the power to institute the widespread change.
If the Store Brands want to “in-source” their delivery and pick-up models then they will need to invest in their e-commerce platforms. They will need to tie together the ordering, status and changes to an existing order through the mobile app. Currently here in March of 2020, that is not happening.
As George Santayana once said, Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it. When the next pandemic occurs or other event that requires less people in a store, let’s learn our lesson about grocery delivery and position ourselves for the scalability that is needed. That scalability can be executed through partnerships in the short term and drone delivery in the long term.