Online US retail grocery: a smorgasbord of mediocrity
- Summary:
- US online grocery shopping has a long way to go. The challenges are many, not least among which are limited availability for full service and general mobile app immaturity.
To say I was underwhelmed puts a gloss on the experience that would put a wry smile on the face of the most skilled and irony bereft PR. A more accurate descriptive word is: "Aaaaaaargh!" And especially the mobile experience which was downright miserable.
We have written extensively about the march towards omni-channel, often highlighting the progress (or non-progress) of retailers as diverse as Walmart, JC Penney and Best Buy. But nothing could prepare me for the (ahem) shit show that is online US grocery retail in our location.
Maybe it is because of my location, but despite the claimed rollout of online shopping services for (you guessed it) Walmart, it's not available in our area. Oh well. How about trying the more local services like Ralphs? No luck there either.
Surely Safeway has to have something? It does - and it doesn't. Wrestling with Safeway...err...Vons...err...was nothing short of mind bending. Vons, which is Safeway in disguise, has a mobile app which gives new meaning to the expression 'temperamental.' At first the app refused to load, then it displayed a confusing set of messages cycling through service not available and on to connection errors then at one point claiming it does not operate in our area.
At one point, my natural tendency to slip into conspiracy theory territory had me wondering if there was a sysops person somewhere in Safeway's customer service center waiting to see if I could logon and then pinging me with random messages sent via an AI powered robot - in beta. Of course. In a world of allegedly intelligent robots, nothing would surprise me.
In the end, I struggled through what I imagine to be the mobile equivalent of web pages to get the order placed. Attempting to do the same thing using a desktop client was not much better.
The good news is that the order was delivered with very few substitutions and inside the one hour timeline I'd been offered during the checkout process.
You might ask why I went this tortuous route when I could simply have taken a cab to the local store or maybe used Amazon Fresh? Several reasons:
- A cab in each direction is going to be a minimum of $5 so I'm adding $10 to the final bill regardless of where I shop. Online services offer incentives including 'free' delivery.
- I wasn't in good physical shape to be hefting anything, let alone 20 plus bags of shopping, even if our front door is only steps away from the elevator.
- Amazon Fresh doesn't operate a bundled delivery service and even if it did, it doesn't do so in our area. And it is a relatively expensive subscription service add-on to Prime. In short, neither beautiful nor fully formed but a cherry picked retread of Amazon's more traditional delivery services.
- Vons was the only nearly working service I could find that operates a full online retail grocery store with delivery to our location, at prices that are competitive.
The consensus was that making grocery retail work profitably is a very tough ask when you're dealing with a combination of difficult logistics and incredibly thin margins. The inevitable question left hanging in the air is: why would any of the retailers do it? Convenience aside, there has to be a sizable market among those who are infirm or otherwise physically challenged.
As a postscript, I returned to the Vons mobile app a couple of days later and bingo! It was operating as I expected. I can only assume that on the day I chose to fire up the app and the two days following, they were in outage or limited service mode.