The “This Week in Startups” podcast from last week, episode 1378, interviewed the CEO.
They are hiring their own drivers and building their own delivery hubs, meaning products you order are coming from their hubs, not from CVS or Walmart. They have more control over efficiency.
They even acquired BevMo and are converting those into hubs.
I'm still skeptical that anyone will win that space. The core problem (instant delivery logistics in a dense urban area) is just too expensive for the average consumer to bear. Right now every player is VC subsidized, but what happens when that money dries up?
The core problem is the whole business model is a solution looking for a problem. The number of people who actually need this is tiny, the rest are just being lazy and as soon as it gets expensive they’ll stop being lazy.
The only way around this is to ‘disrupt’ local shops out of business which I’m sure is the plan and afaict that’s a net negative for everyone apart from them.
No, the labor is too expensive. Ultimately you are paying someone for a couple hours of work, plus spending on vehicle deprecation, gas, parking, storage, all to deliver someone a packet of chips.
How do they scale demand for peak times with a fixed workforce? It seems trivially easy for say Uber to start hubs if they wanted to and they have a huge existing base.
But it comes down to execution and it will be interesting to see the space in another 5 years.
