Metadata

Highlights

  • Pandemic or no pandemic, delivering highly perishable goods to millions of people, often with the promise that those goods will arrive in as little as 15 minutes, has proved a very tricky business: The unit economics are bad, the margins are bad, and the logistics infrastructure necessary to make the actual service function, even unprofitably, is extraordinarily complicated (bad).
  • These start-ups are expanding their services to meet a customer demand that, by all indications, does not yet exist.
  • Their biggest problem might just be that people like going grocery shopping.
  • But as many Americans realized during the worst days of the early pandemic, when demand for grocery delivery soared, that kind of isolation isn’t all that fantastic of a lifestyle choice. Mostly, it’s just kind of lonely.