remember webvan? HomeGrocer?
Aug. 24th, 2010 07:19 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
walkitoutOnce Upon a Time, in the Land of the Perpetual Overcast Without Actual Rain, in the Time of Giddy Excitement Regarding All Things Online, there were people who thought it would be just grand if everything could be delivered to your door. For cheap. HomeGrocer was funded in part by Amazon.com, the Little Bookstore That Could. It was bought by WebVan. Webvan was founded by the guy who started the Borders chain. You know, the bookstores. Webvan had some crazy ideas even by dotcom standards: lobsters within 30 minutes. Robot warehouses to the tune of a billion dollars. Just nutty. Webvan was bought by Amazon and appears to be part of the "Amazon family", but is conspicuously _not_ Amazon Fresh, which looks (and judging by remarks from my friend K. in Seattle) seems to work more or less the way HomeGrocer used to. With a whole lot less excitement and no high profile plans for rapid deployment in major cities across the US.
There have been grocery delivery business for longer than there have been supermarkets. A few months ago, during my railroad obsession, I stumbled across some amazingly bitter commentary by grocers and dry goods retailers, complaining about railroad express companies cherry picking all their high profit items, making it difficult to stay in business when the customers only came in to buy the stuff with margins too tight to tempt the express companies. It sounded Awful Familiar.
In any event, Roche Bros. and Albertsons and a host of other chains big and small will happily take your order (over the phone, through a website, probably via fax for all I know) and pick it from their shelves or wherever, and either deliver it to you or have it available for pickup at a set time. My brother-in-law loves one in New Jersey, and he seemed to think it was getting as much business through the we-shop as the you-shop side of the operation.
I think there's a parallel here, with ebooks. I don't think the parallel is pure. But I do think that a whole lot of people are going to keep reading paper books for five years, ten years -- for the rest of my life and the lives of a lot of other people. And a lot of people are going to be ordering their groceries, instead of picking them off the shelves themselves. The whole thing will be disruptive, and expensive, and investors big and small are going to get cleaned out, at least some of them, while other people do really, really well.
The thing to watch out for, as near as I can tell, is the old guy with a lot of money. Last time, it was Louis Borders. This time, I'm thinking it might be the Riggios. They might or might not disrupt the development of the new business, but there might be a whole lot of donated produce, er, product when they finally wind it down in BK.
There have been grocery delivery business for longer than there have been supermarkets. A few months ago, during my railroad obsession, I stumbled across some amazingly bitter commentary by grocers and dry goods retailers, complaining about railroad express companies cherry picking all their high profit items, making it difficult to stay in business when the customers only came in to buy the stuff with margins too tight to tempt the express companies. It sounded Awful Familiar.
In any event, Roche Bros. and Albertsons and a host of other chains big and small will happily take your order (over the phone, through a website, probably via fax for all I know) and pick it from their shelves or wherever, and either deliver it to you or have it available for pickup at a set time. My brother-in-law loves one in New Jersey, and he seemed to think it was getting as much business through the we-shop as the you-shop side of the operation.
I think there's a parallel here, with ebooks. I don't think the parallel is pure. But I do think that a whole lot of people are going to keep reading paper books for five years, ten years -- for the rest of my life and the lives of a lot of other people. And a lot of people are going to be ordering their groceries, instead of picking them off the shelves themselves. The whole thing will be disruptive, and expensive, and investors big and small are going to get cleaned out, at least some of them, while other people do really, really well.
The thing to watch out for, as near as I can tell, is the old guy with a lot of money. Last time, it was Louis Borders. This time, I'm thinking it might be the Riggios. They might or might not disrupt the development of the new business, but there might be a whole lot of donated produce, er, product when they finally wind it down in BK.