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.