Grocery Delivery Wars

This message comes from NPR Babson College. Gain skills to lead through Babson College's MBA . Join the school ranked number one in entrepreneurship for years by U.S. News and World Report. Apply at babson.edu/MBA.

0:18
This is Planet Money from NPR.

0:23
For the last few months, our Alex Goldmark has been inundated with . He lives in Manhattan, and any time he leaves his house, he spots and . He gets in the mail and promo codes in his Instagram feed. The are from a bunch of companies, all pushing him to try ultra-fast delivery. And ultra-fast means really fast, like get your 10 or 20 minutes after you your order fast.

And so on a cold and slushy February night, Alex did something he had never done before.

0:55
All right, let's get groceries. Let's see fast they can come.

0:59
He an app, his info, and started tapping little of the things he wanted:

1:04
Broccoli. Tomato. . Red grapes. Couple bagels. Black seed salmon. Black seed smoked salmon, okay! Chickpeas. Chocolate. water. Philadelphia cream cheese.
I think that was everything, right?

1:18
He's finished, and then?

1:20
And I'm gonna click on . I can get one beer for $.

1:24
He thinks, eh, might as well go for a six .

1:27
And I'm done. So let's do . $.
Delivery . Buzz nine F.
Okay, and now we wait.

1:38
From the moment Alex his , a is on to get him his chickpeas and chocolate and smoked salmon in . With a tap on his screen, he off a super speedy, hyper-local challenge.

1:51
Hello, and welcome to Planet Money. I'm Wayland Wong. And I'm Erica Barris.

1:52

We a lot of money on groceries. More than we spend on , more than we spend on , more than we spend on . It's a dollar market.

And now a whole of startups are vying for a of it. The companies are trying to a completely new of grocery store, where there are no lines, no conveyor , no . They're called stores,
micro centers hidden behind darkened city .

Normally, you can't just pop in and walk around a dark store. But we did.

Today on the show, behind the scenes in the competitive world of ultra-fast grocery delivery.

2:43
Hi, it's Terri Gross, the of Fresh Air. I just the creator of HBO's Succession, Jesse Armstrong, and executive producer, Frank Rich, and talked about creating the and plot lines, including why does Logan Roy's begin and end in the ?
Here's a special interview on Fresh Air from NPR.

3:03
These new companies have names like Gorillaz. That's the one Alex ordered .

There's also GoPuff, Joker, Gatier. A lot of them got in cities in Europe, and venture capital firms have poured dollars into them over the last two years. These grocery delivery startups are all speed. And a big way they that is by positioning little centers in the middle of dense urban .

So when Alex placed his order, it came to this storefront less than a mile . The windows are with ads for the company, so you can't see in.

I arrived a little of the evening rush. Adam Wasensky operations at Gorillaz.

3:47
Where we are is where we sort of orders and send them to your home.

3:52
When I walk in, the first thing I notice are the harsh, almost lights.

I walked in and I was just like, whoa, I've never walked into a grocery store
and it's this .

4:01
What do you ?

4:02
Adam says it has to be bright to help the workers who around the small groceries off the .

4:09
Gotta be able to see what you're , right? So, you know, especially with , you don't want it to be too dark because there may be that one on the that you don't want to send to a customer, right? And it's gotta be bright in order for you to see that.

4:25
If you're gonna , and an order in minutes, then every step in the process has to work together and work fast. That's why this store throws just about everything we know about grocery store out the window.

Think about what it's like when you a typical grocery store. You walk through the glass doors and into an area. The color is calming. You see of things you may not need, but maybe want, like flowers or pumpkins or little house kits. Retail architects call those first few feet of a store the zone. It's all about relaxing you, putting you in the to stay a and buy a lot of groceries.

Stores spend money on all of things to put customers at . Some drop hundreds of thousands of dollars just on lighting. Here at the dark store, it's not just that's different.

For example, the here are all one way, marked with arrows, so the grocery pickers know which way to go. Because of that, the aisles can be super ,
about three feet . That saves space. It's something you'd never see in a regular grocery store because of what some retail architects call the butt effect.

5:35
The brush effect?

The butt brush effect. Basically, you wanna give customers lots of because the last thing anyone wants when they're shopping is to brush someone else's butt. That would make them and uncomfortable people don't wanna stay and money.

And then there are the . Grocery stores live and die by something called a . A planogram is like the of a store. goes in the front because color-blocked fruits and have a relaxing effect.
The pasta is near the sauce because customers look for those things . stuff is all in one spot.

And there are lots of other things grocery stores do that you probably wouldn't notice, like they place for kids on shelves. Fish is not near coffee, too many competing strong . The planogram in a dark store has a totally different logic, like similar things are , not together.

6:35
It helps in our picking accuracy, and so in the grocery store, when you're looking at the shelves, you wanna see all of the seltzer water together. Whereas here, we actually don't want to see that because it can lead to mistakes in picking. So we separate those things.

6:51
The whole store is laid out with that in mind. Pickers quickly grabbing the right thing. Here, the spaghetti is never next to the linguine because they're so easy to confuse. The salt is on a different shelf from the pepper. And very different seeming items can wind up on the same shelf.

7:08
There's garbage bags, there's batteries, there's shot glasses, there's a tea towel, there's a gift bag, Reynolds wrap, and foil pans. You know, all of the sort of things that you might need for a party are on this shelf.

7:19
The shelf exists because people order these things together, and the store constantly its shelves based on data from the app. That means things are moving around in the store all the time, and that can get . So pickers also rely on a system for the aisles and shelves to guide them around.

Every time an order comes , a bell sound rings from a computer up at the front of the store. And like a Pavlovian response, everyone calls out, .

So remember that order Alex made? This bell is the one I was waiting for. From the moment Alex hit place order, the app told him he would get his delivery in minutes. So all those adjustments we just saw, the narrow aisles and super bright lights, the seemingly illogical grocery shelves, now it's time to see how they work in practice.

8:08
Tyler White, the store , is the person picking this order.

8:12
Okay.

8:13
First thing Tyler does is a cart, preloaded with empty grocery bags, and he starts down a one-way aisle. As he moves, he consults a screen that shows him everything Alex ordered, organized by weight and .

8:26
So we have La Croix lemon here. So I'm gonna go ahead and scan it. Excuse me, Ray, I am through, good sir.

8:34
The bubbly water that Alex added at the end of his order comes first because it's heaviest and at the bottom of the bag. Tyler whips through the store, grabbing and , and scanning, grabbing and scanning.
And I notice another difference between this store and the ones I'm used to.

8:51
Do these shopping carts have any brakes? You know, like they're going really fast.

8:55
No, they don't have any brakes on them.

8:57
They're like all-wheel drive carts.

8:59
Yeah, pretty much, especially with how we like to drive them around here.

9:03
Most regular grocery store carts have two fixed wheels, so you'll move a little slower through the aisles. Take your time and shop. Pretty soon, Tyler's pulled items off the shelves. It's only taken him three from start to . Alex's order, or as everyone at the store knows it, order , is picked and packed.

9:22
Yep, 162, and that's the one that has beer in it.

9:25
There are two working tonight, plus a couple of people who clean and stock shelves. Then there are five people groceries. They're called because they're all on bikes. And up front, where you'd normally have checkout lines, there's the store's , Kenneth Bigsby. People are always telling him he looks like someone.

9:43
Killmonger, it's because of the hair.

9:45
You know, like from Black Panther? Kenneth is sort of like the guy,
distributing orders to pickers, figuring out delivery , taking customer .

9:55
What is this?
Received yogurt that was liquid.

9:58
But right now, the task at hand is the beer that our boss Alex ordered, because beer is one thing that this whole operation is not set up to . They don't have a liquor license, so they have this clunky .

When an order for beer comes in, it gets redirected to a store a few blocks away.

10:18
This one's got a six- of Heineken with it. You gotta pick up.

10:23
And when Kenneth loads up Alex's delivery guy, he tells him, you gotta make a beer stop. That means the rider, a guy named General Washington, is gonna have to stop, get off his bike, get the beer, and then load everything up again.

It's the total opposite of all the they're going for inside the store. And it's not the only problem I saw.

More on that after the break.

10:48
This message comes from NPR sponsor, Babson College.
Build your story at Babson College. Join a community of problem solvers
at the school ranked number one in entrepreneurship for 30 years by US News and World Report. Babson's action-oriented hands-on learning approach helps you find opportunity in every challenge so you can lead, innovate, and inspire in the business world. Babson is where your entrepreneurial leadership journey begins.
Get started at Babson.edu/success.

11:32
In the business world, groceries are what's called a red ocean industry because it's so cutthroat. Think of what the ocean would look like after a few battles where not everyone survives.

Most of the ultra-fast delivery companies that are battling it out right now aren't money. For every order they sound out the door, they've spent even more on advertising, rent, codes, and the labor it takes to pick and deliver the orders.

Is this now?

12:01
No, because we're still and still new to the market and ramping up.

12:08
Adam, the head of operations, used to work for another startup you may have heard of, WeWork. So he's used to the kind of upside-down logic of venture-backed companies.

For these new grocery startups, the whole name of the game is to change people's , get them hooked on getting their groceries super quickly and easily. But right now, this company is still out a lot of stuff, and the more time I spent in the store, the more I saw problems.

Like one of the couriers, his phone died, so they had to make time to charge it instead of sending him out with an order. Then someone managed to order mozzarella cheese sticks through the app, but those actually weren't in stock.
And at one point, Kenneth, the store supervisor, found himself with 12 orders , more coming in, and not a single delivery person in sight.

12:59
The next person that comes in will take order one, the next person will take order two, three, four, five, and so on. Sorry, it's kind of hard to think because I have other orders coming through.

13:10
And then I started to wonder how they'd ever make a buck at this, because a lot of the orders that were coming in weren't for a couple of days of groceries like Alex's was. They were small, so the store was putting all this energy into delivering, like four cans of coconut milk or two pints of ice cream plus some chips and candy.

13:28
I'm thinking they just have some late night munchies.

13:31
Adam told me the biggest challenge has been lining up distributors for this new kind of store. The only space they have is on their shelves, so they need smaller deliveries coming more frequently. Distributors don't always prioritize them, and sometimes they can't get everything they need.

Was there the great strawberry incident of October? You know, like when you're all just scrambling.

13:53
I mean, there's tons of what seemed like
the great strawberry incidents of October.

14:00
At one point, they couldn't get Gatorade. Another time, it was eggs. Lucky for our boss, Alex, when he put in his order, he snagged the last sesame seed bagel.
And when his groceries went out the door, there were minutes left in his promised delivery time.

He tracked the order on his phone.

14:15
Okay, it's 5:43 now. I can see a little bike guy. Look at him.

14:20
As he watched the little bike icon, he noticed the beer stop.

14:23
The little bike man is not moving. Still at Delancey Street.

14:29
But General Washington manages to pull up right on time.

14:33
Did you do a bunch of people's orders all at once?

14:35
Yeah, we're getting so much orders that we have to start stacking them.

14:39
All right, well, I mean, you said 23 minutes, and you showed up at exactly 23 minutes, so.

14:43
Really? Oh, okay, cool.

14:44
Oh, is that not normal?

14:45
Yeah, it's like I try my best to keep it, but I don't know the exact time that they give you for me to arrive. I only know to get there as soon as possible.

14:54
Is it really stressful?

14:55
Oh, it's just, it can be. It can be, yeah, it can be.

14:59
General Washington has been working for Gorillaz for a few months. He used to do gig work for Postmates and Uber Eats, but in this new job, he's a full-time employee. For him, that means a reliable , health insurance, a regular schedule, and Gorillaz provides his delivery bike. But it's hard to know how long it will last.

Because all of the analysts and experts who are watching these new grocery delivery companies, they say they've seen this before. Venture capital investors get interested in a new kind of business, and they make huge gambles on it.
What that usually means for customers is subsidies. Think meal kit companies giving a week of free meals, or Uber getting you all the way across town for $10.

But then competition thins out. Some companies go under, others get acquired, maybe a couple go public.

And the startups left standing start behaving more like real businesses that have to turn a profit. So they start raising prices, service times get longer,
and other cracks in the system maybe start to appear. In fact, right now, Gorillaz is facing allegations from workers in Berlin, where the company is based. Employees there have been staging walkouts because of missed paychecks, broken delivery bikes, and heavy orders that they say have led to back injuries.
The company says they've been trying to work with the protesters and make improvements.

The thing I kept wondering, watching orders go out the door was, do we really need this? Like, do any of us need groceries delivered in 20 minutes?

But maybe it's not about need. Sometimes companies demand. They create a convenience that we get used to and we don't want to live without.
Like with Alex. Less than a week after he placed that first order, it was another cold, dreary day. He needed groceries. So he ordered again.

16:46
Just a note, Gorillaz is a financial supporter of NPR.

16:57
After we finished taping this episode, two ultra-fast delivery companies, Fridge No More and Bike, shut down operations. Not because they ran out of money, but because they were financed by Russian investors.

There's a lot going on right now, and you probably have a lot of questions. We know we do, about the economics of a geopolitical war, about sanctions and what they mean, and questions we may not have even thought of. Send us those questions.

It helps us plan what we're gonna cover next. We're at planetmoney at npr.org.

And look for us on social media. Our TikTok is especially delightful. We're at Planet Money.

17:38
This episode was edited by Molly Messick and produced by Dave Blanchard. It was mastered by Isaac Rodriguez. Alex Goldmark is our executive producer.

Thank you to Sucharita Kadali, Paco Underhill,
Daniel Folkman, Christopher Rader, Alex Frederick,
Sylvay Charleboy, Yong Can, Diego Donimiller,
and Joseph Wollstedt-Croft.

I'm Erica Barris.
And I'm Waylon Wong.

This is NPR.

Thanks for listening.