IS IT TIME TO RELOOK AT ONLINE GROCERY STRATEGIES - REMEMBER PEAPOD, HOME GROCER, AND WEBVAN?

as well as save money using a warehouse instead of a large retail space to provide those goods and services to consumers at a fair and equitable price without the super surcharges for delivery.

 

 

Perhaps you remember the great fall of WebVan, the noble attempt at an online grocery store that would deliver products to your home. Everybody thought the concept was brilliant, and it attracted a huge amount of venture capital. In fact, one of the founders of one of the largest bookstores invested a huge amount of money.

 

Many thought it would become the death of the grocery store model, and everything would then be delivered to your home without the retail space, rather all the groceries in a giant warehouse with robotic systems loading up boxes to be delivered. In fact, at the time many of the largest grocery store chains were quite worried that they would be left in the dust due to this new innovation. Safeway tried to invest in 30 million into Grocery Works to capture the online home deliver business model, but that also turned out to be a bad move in hindsight.

 

One could say that WebVan's spectacular fall was very similar to Solyndra, or was it just ahead of its time, and was the leadership less than competent when it came to delivering services, as this grocery store model was selling a service, not necessarily only in the food retail product business. Today, things are much different we have online social networks, people are ordering or things with their cell phone, and we live in a world of instantaneous fulfillment.

 

If someone were to relook at this concept understanding routing, traffic, along with all the big data to understand what the consumers really wanted, they might be able  desi fresh market to make it work. In fact, I believe it is time to relook at the online grocery store strategies and model, perhaps a WebVan failed because it was ahead of its time. That of course, and they invested far too much in the innovation of robotic warehousing before all those technologies were feasible and cost-effective.

 

Today, Amazon has many patents for robotic warehousing and fulfillment, and the technology has come a long way. Thanks to new technologies and algorithms for mitigating traffic jams, routing software is better than it's ever been previously as well. It seems as if such a company could enjoy those synergies,

 

Who knows in the future a Google self-driving autonomous car could be delivering your groceries. Indeed I hope you will please consider all this and think on it from a philosophical and strategic business standpoint.

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