How bizarre that the article mentions Amazon Fresh but completely fails to mention that you can get free delivery from Whole Foods via Prime Now. I routinely order stuff from Whole Foods through Prime Now and get it just a few hours later, it's pretty awesome. I used to occasionally order Whole Foods via Instacart but haven't once since the acquisition.
More like "free". Amazon preselects $5 tip for the delivery. I don't have to tip the FedEx driver, why should I tip this delivery driver? It's not free if I'm expected to tip.
Pay your workers a living wage and build it into the price.
Do you tip pizza delivery, or do you say that you don’t tip fedex so you won’t tip pizza either? Arguably, pizza delivery drivers do even less work than Instacart people who have to shop on your behalf and wait in checkout lines etc.
Tipping is a weirdly American phenomenon. Travel, for example, to the EU or other parts of the world where there's no tipping. Workers are paid a living wage and have benefits (esp. in countries that didn't go with employer-supplied benefits in the wake of WWII). They want no part of "tipping". Combine that with VAT-using countries, and it's delightful to look at a restaurant menu and realize there's zero obfuscation about what the final bill will be. Not to mention tipping as a vehicle for wage theft, and playing into a generally regressive compensation system.
Agreed: not tipping as an individual act in the US makes you a jerk, hurting workers without changing the system. Such change would probably have to be brought about via legislation that rolled up a combination of wage and benefits reforms.
The workers don’t want the system to be changed. I worked in restaurants for six years, and most of my friends still do.
Servers make 2-3x what kitchen staff do, sometimes even better. Even on the very worst nights in the cheapest restaurants I’ve never seen a server come away with less than kitchen staff. Cash tips are also often underreported.
Good nights can be absolutely fantastic. I’ve earned an entire 40 hour kitchen check in three hours waiting tables.
Kitchen staff wouldn’t mind, managers wouldn’t mind, probably even owners wouldn’t mind so much, but servers would be mass protesting if you eliminated tipping. They want you to raise their employer-paid wage, sure. Affordable health insurance would be great. But they absolutely do not want an end to tipping.
And no, no employer is going to pay servers what they’d make with tips on an average night, and even if they did, kitchen staff would go on strike unless they got it too. And then you’re looking at food prices skyrocketing.
You must always understand the starting point of something. The rest of the world didn't start with tippping, hence why they adapted without. When restaurants in the United States have tried removing tipping, they lose their best waiters to rivals whom still do offer tipping, which causes them to quickly switch back to tipping.
It's like credit cards and mobile payments. Why has India and China embraced mobile payments so much more than the west? Because they never had credit cards! The delta between paying in currency and paying with a mobile phone is vastly greater than the delta of paying with a credit card vs a mobile phone. So the places which had credit cards in the past, mobile payments are not as ubiquitous as in China or India.
According to the first major source on Google, tipping was brought to America from Europe. Likewise, I don't think any other country but us has laws to subsidize wage for tips. Also, comparing mobile payments to credit cards isa weak comparison, they serve entirely different purposes.
I don’t think there’s something so wrong with the practice that it needs to be justified.
If you don’t want to tip, don’t. Believe me, not everyone tips. I’m not sure what the real problem with it (the wage issue, at least for restaurants, is a red herring$ other than it makes some people who dislike social interactions uncomfortable.
I'll try to clarify some important reasons why tipping is bad:
1. It offsets labor cost to the generosity of customers, putting an employee's take-home in the hands of the customer.
2. This creates an interaction with the staff where they have incentive to try obtaining an additional ambiguous amount of money from the customer.
3. Sometimes this means being overly characteristic, other times it means trying upsell you to raise the total amount, effectively raising their tip.
4. Other countries reject tipping because they want their employees giving you 100% service regardless of a tip incentive (because there is none). In America, good tippers are treated better by staff (especially at bars, think stronger drinks), while bad tippers get what they get (not something you want from a food serving establishment: watch the movie Waiting and try telling me foregoing tipping is a good idea).
Tipping is an abomination of a custom that we should reject as a society.
> 1. It offsets labor cost to the generosity of customers, putting an employee's take-home in the hands of the customer.
But the customers are not obligated to tip (and some don't), giving them the option of cheaper food, and employees make a much higher average wage than they would otherwise.
There's no way this is a negative.
> 2. This creates an interaction with the staff where they have incentive to try obtaining an additional ambiguous amount of money from the customer.
> 3. Sometimes this means being overly characteristic, other times it means trying upsell you to raise the total amount, effectively raising their tip
Sure. If you have a really high care factor on a particular day you'll try to be nicer and work a little harder than you might otherwise. Most days you really don't put any more effort into it than you would in the kitchen. It's a job. I'm not seeing why this is a problem. And certainly upselling is going to be encouraged by management regardless of whether you get tips!
As an aside, even though establishments (and servers, naturally) encourage it, I don't believe in tipping based on the size of the bill. I tip based on three factors: 1) how many people are in the party b) how long we were there and iii) how much I like the server.
> while bad tippers get what they get (not something you want from a food serving establishment: watch the movie Waiting and try telling me foregoing tipping is a good idea).
In general, watching movies to understand real behavior is not well-advised. If you are a regular, and recognized as such, and known to be a good tipper, you will most likely get better service. If you are a regular and stiff the server, 99% of the time you just get average service and a server complaining behind your back. Nobody, as a rule, messes with your food. I am saying this with not only the confidence of someone who did that kind of work for years, but as someone who now will quite readily stiff a server that I don't think deserves a tip. If you're eating at the kind of place where people would screw with your order because of your tipping, they're going to screw with it for other arbitrary reasons too.
> Tipping is an abomination of a custom that we should reject as a society.
Your "important reasons" seem a little specious. I get the feeling your main reason is you don't like doing it for some personal reason, but you're afraid of the social consequences if you don't. Look, if you don't like it, leave a perfunctory tip or none at all. I paid for most of my degree with cash earned from waiting tables. It's one of the best options available to people in the lower and middle classes who need flexible schedules and have no skills. There are a lot of people who don't tip. It won't hurt anyone's feelings too much, and will certainly generate less eye-rolling than the people who leave religious pamphlets or advertisements as a "tip."
Our inner thread has reached it's max depth, so I'm replying here. We'll probably have to end this conversion because of that, so here's my final response:
> But the customers are not obligated to tip
> If you are a regular and stiff the server, 99% of the time you just get average service and a server complaining behind your back.
> There's no way this is a negative.
So you're telling me if I'm a regular at a spot and I want to strictly pay the required amount for (food+environment+service) and nothing more, then I should accept "average service" and being complained about in the kitchen? That's exactly how you lose regular customers.
> If you have a really high care factor on a particular day you'll try to be nicer and work a little harder than you might otherwise.
Employees should be just as nice and work just as hard as the employer asks them, because that's their job. The people with the money (employers and customers) make the rules, not the worker.
> If you are a regular, and recognized as such, and known to be a good tipper, you will most likely get better service.
This is exactly the behavior we're trying to stop. Service should always be good.
> Nobody, as a rule, messes with your food. If you're eating at the kind of place where people would screw with your order because of your tipping, they're going to screw with it for other arbitrary reasons too.
I know several people who've either been first-hand responsible or been whiteness to others performing gross things to people's food. This is edge-case for sure, but still a reality.
> your main reason is you don't like doing it for some personal reason, but you're afraid of the social consequences if you don't.
My main reasons are:
A) tips are taxed and aren't the "gift" people think they are. This is how the government allows employers to reduce a workers minimum wage down to like, $2.xx or something, and you won't find any worker who is happy about that, only employers and government.
B) it creates a favorites-game between employees and customers, not something I'm interested in as a customer. The only people who like that system are people who get the benefits from it. Those who get screwed, get screwed.
C) This standard doesn't span the entire service industry, and wait staff have no special place in my heart that the rest of the industry doesn't also have.
Also, why do you say "stiff" when referring to someone paying the full and complete amount of their meal and service? To 'stiff' literally means to cheat or steal. As you say, the customer is not obliged in any way to pay more. Using this term is bully tactics, telling people that not paying extra makes them bad in some way.
---
I've realized that the problem here simply lies in which perspective we value more. Do we accept that the customer should help pay the wage of the worker with a taxed donation, or do we accept that the customer should have an easy flat price absent from favoritism?
> The workers don’t want the system to be changed.
Certainly not in traditionally tipped industries like restaurant servers where tipping culture is strong. The new jobs that employers are trying to make tipped may not have the same feature, especially those which both already have a service charge and try to push tipping. OTOH, maybe the tip pushing is more successful than I think.
I don't disagree with this, and I basically refuse to tip at anything other than sit-down restaurants, and I don't give my business to companies that charge automatic gratuities.
(I think you have parent's assessment backwards, but):
This exactly. When the minimum wage was created in the 30s, tipped workers were exempt if they could amass an identical wage from tips, a system some states still use. This is nothing more than business owners offsetting the cost of labor onto the generosity of customers.
I'm a NYC native, and I tip because I realize that the system is rigged to enable food and entertainment employers to take advantage of there employees. Yea, I don't like it either. But it's here so I just roll with it.
There was an episode of "Adam Ruins Everything" about this. Basically, during prohibition, restaurants couldn't sell alcohol (which was their biggest profit center), so in order to stay afloat, they cut staff wages and introduced the concept of tipping to cover the gap. It kind of stuck since then.
> There was an episode of "Adam Ruins Everything" about this. Basically, during prohibition, restaurants couldn't sell alcohol (which was their biggest profit center), so in order to stay afloat, they cut staff wages and introduced the concept of tipping to cover the gap.
So, I guess its time for an episode of “Dragonwriter Ruins Adam Ruins Everything”.
Americans imported the practice of tipping from Europe just after the civil war (some accounts say as an excuse for restaurant owners not to pay newly-freed blacks working as servers, but that's less than clear, though where such workers were common, it was certainly leveraged for that purpose), and there was criticism of the new but rapidly-spreading practice as unamerican and pro-aristocratic in the late 19th Century, before prohibition.
Heck, here's a pre-Prohibition (1916) book about the practice of tipping in America, which even recounts past legislative efforts to stop it:
regardless of the real reason, it is to offset 100% of the risk to the employees (no business, no tip, no salary), while keeping >80% of the profits (lot's of business, staff keep at most 20%)
You say this is a good thing, until you go to Europe and get treated terrible service.
I was seriously confused why our waters werent getting filled up, despite walking 10+ miles before noon. Or why the waiter wasnt coming to our table to take our order. Or why the waiter didn't check on us.
After sharing this story with locals, it seems their expectations are far less for restaurants.
I don't have much of an opinion on how to pay waiters, but Italy did not impress me.
I'm not familiar with Italy specifically, but note that service expectations differ broadly in the EU. In many countries, customers expect to be left alone until they signal the wait staff for something. The American notion of staff that hovers over and/or badgers you constantly is largely absent.
In the countries I've travelled to, I've generally had excellent service, bearing the above in mind.
> The American notion of staff that hovers over and/or badgers you constantly is largely absent.
This is a straw man. Nobody in the US expects this - and in fact, it's rare that this even happens. At most the server will "interrupt" you once once your food arrives to check in, and even that varies by restaurant.
> In many countries, customers expect to be left alone until they signal the wait staff for something
I think you're missing what people are talking about when they talk about "terrible or slow service" in Europe. It's not that they wait for you to signal to them, but that they take so long to appear where you can find them in the first place, and that once you do grab their attention, they still take ages to actually come and serve you. They're not necessarily doing anything important or urgent (chatting idly with their coworkers, wiping down the bar, what have you), and it's eminently clear that they simply don't view providing prompt and effective service to customers as their priority.
I could give countless stories of how slow and inefficient service in Europe tends to be, or even how downright rude servers can be.
For the record, yes, this is a strictly European phenomenon. There are plenty of other places in the world (both where tipping is expected and where it isn't) where this is not an issue.
> Nobody in the US expects this - and in fact, it's rare that this even happens. At most the server will "interrupt" you once once your food arrives to check in, and even that varies by restaurant.
I live in the North East, and not only does a typical experience involve frequent table visits, it is an increasingly popular topic when discussing restaurants and sharing or writing reviews. People will raise it before mentioning the food!
> At most the server will "interrupt" you once once your food arrives to check in
My experience is that is closer to a (frequently exceeded) minimum in US restaurants offering full table service than a maximum (except for the rare case where the server completely disappears and neither checks nor can be summoned without accosting a busser or some other server, but those are presumably employee failures and not restaurant practice.)
Having lived in the US all my life, service typically goes as follows:
Host seats you
Waiter delivers menus, asks if you want drinks
Waiter returns with drinks, asks if you're ready to order, and if not, comes back 5 min later
Waiter delivers food
Waiter comes back in 5 minutes to make sure it's to your liking
Waiter comes back to ask if you want dessert, and if not, hands you the bill.
If you've taken a long time to eat, they may return once or twice to keep your drinks topped off.
That's it. It's formulaic and quite standard. In my decades of living in various states, I've never had an experience like I see EU folk on here complain about.
Waiter returns with drinks, asks if you're ready to order, and if not, comes back 5 min later
Waiter delivers food
Waiter comes back in 5 minutes to make sure it's to your liking
Waiter comes back to ask if you want dessert, and if not, hands you the bill.
>
Which in certain places is precisely too much? What is considered to be minimal and norm by some, is too much by others.
I will ask for Drinks,
I will ask to place orders,
I will ask for desert when I want to,
I will tell you if the food is bad, or more like I will not tell you and leave it on the plate.
Don't come and talk to me with small talks, I am enjoying my time with my guest.
And I will ask for bills
The only thing the waiter have to do is to keep an eye on the table from time to time because he or she should know what the stages of that table is up to.
You see, that is the difference with expectation. Push and Pull. Americans expect the Services to be Pushed to them, while many others expect services only when asked, Pull.
( I wish I could think of a HTTP jokes here )
As to the tipping culture, in some places it is absolutely insulting to tip.
And no, A Glass of water is not a standard part of services before you ask.
Having also lived in the USA all my life, several rounds of checking in if they can get anything else, refill drinks, and/or clear plates are also common, though not universal (and better—read, roughly, more expensive—establishments will do much of that without asking and so interrupt less for the same end result.)
Yeah. And that often bugs the shit out of me. I know they are doing the excessive attention thing, angling for a bigger tip.. which.. I already tip minimum 20% but they don't know that.. and there's no protocol for "everything is fine please leave me/us alone", not to mention, it puts the power dynamic in stark relief, which is not what I'm eating out for. I'm currently vacationing in mexico, and it's delightful to not have hovering service. Pay your staff a living wage.
In my country it's considered rude to interrupt people while they're talking or eating. We wouldn't want someone to come to the table without being asked. Unless you're at a dinner service often water isn't served, you're expected to get it yourself from the counter. In the major cities US-style service is more common and most locals find it annoying and just wave the server away.
The worst service I've ever had was in Canada where they do tip, and I was rating that by the North American standards rather than my home country's. I still tipped the standard amount because I disagree with tipping, but he didn't seem incentivised.
It's important to rate experiences by what the region is expecting, not by what you expect at home.
It wouldnt be considered rude if it were a routine transaction, which in the US it is. Obviously we wouldnt want the waiter interrupting for tasks outside the norm.
In my experience having lived in 3 countries (5 years each), where tipping was implied good etiquette the most only in the US, and partly in Canada; by the rough measure of filling water or checking on folks and things of that sort, US isn't any better or worse than the other countries. In fact, I was actually told by someone in the US told me they employ strategies of being friendly and spend a few minutes conversing with patrons as they present the bill, so that they can drive the tip up (for good reasons - since they depend on them quite a bit).
Where I am living currently, I think there is more income equality - partly I believe is because of having more or less good wages despite line of work, and you get treated like how someone would normally treat you without being forced upon with the expectation of a tip.
No that statement does not state that tips are required for good service, it implies that if Europe had tips it would have better service than it does today. Obviously tips are not required for good service as many restaurants and even Japan as a whole manage to do it.
Cultures vary. Many regions have waiters that are called when needed rather than coming by themselves. I much prefer that to the awkward interruptions in American restaurants just so we can say "everything's fine" in the middle of a conversation.
Waiters working for tips leads to a territorial approach to customers and leads to an awkward dynamic where they aren't focused on good service but rather the impression of good service required for the tip.
Silly anecdotal evidence. I can counter that with having received terrible service in the US. Especially because each waited only cares about their own little territory where they expect to farm tips. Means getting ignored by other waiters. I supposes Americans are used to this, but travel some and you'll realize it's completely bonkers, and NOT good service.
What's interesting is that every time the topic comes up, you get Europeans who complain about the service in the US and Americans who complain about the service in Europe.
I'm on the European side of things so I do not want to be approached while eating. I want to flag the waiter whenever I want something and I absolutely hate fake small talk in order to drive the tip up. It feels so artificial and not genuine (and happened often enough in the US).
I do like small talks with waiters that are genuine but having the possibility of a tip kind of destroys that.
To be fair though, waiters in touristy places everywhere suck. So that might also be the issue if you went to a tourist hole instead of a restaurant for locals.
There is no tipping in Asia and I have better service here than Europe? Especially in Taiwan. Drop a chop stick? They are at your table with a new set before it hits the ground. Cup half empty, boom they fill it.
> I was seriously confused why our waters werent getting filled up, despite walking 10+ miles before noon. Or why the waiter wasnt coming to our table to take our order. Or why the waiter didn't check on us.
Unlike the US, waiters don't bug you every 30 seconds, and I consider that a feature. You actually have to ask for things you want, and you signal to a waiter when you want something. Unless you found an exceptionally shitty restaurant, they'll almost always come right over.
> You say this is a good thing, until you go to Europe and get treated terrible service.
Try Eastern Europe. You are expected to tip, and the service is usually atrociously slow (and not necessarily good in any other way either). Bad service culture is bad service culture. Where I live waiters are expected to perform their jobs properly just like everyone else.
But if I were to say the service was terrible, and therefore I didn't tip, that would be disapproved of. In the US, I am expected to tip whether or not the service was good, so how does that incentivize good service - unless I'm expected to tip even more when I'm pleased with the service.
Not impressed by the deeply poor? Color me un-empathetic. That's the entire issue that is being discussed here. Supply and demand has nothing to do with humanity.
Americans love to be tyrannical and punitive, particularly with service employees. And business owners are more than happy to grant them that in exchange for lower wages. Feels like a fair trade to me.
It's an interesting cultural thing though. The number of times I've seen people on HN calling for someone to lose their job over a public fuck up rather than treating it as a learning experience for the employee seems absurd.
The idea that you should grovel and always defer to your boss because they're kind enough to employ you is something I've only seen from Americans.
An occurrence I hate. Personally I didn't see it at all until about ten years ago, it tends to arise at those same establishments that interrupt your conversation to ask you if you are "fine".
An interesting angle perhaps we could discuss is how much of the persistence of this barbarian culture that tipping is, has to do with the fact that in the US, the expectations that displayed prices are final isn't very strong anymore, to the point that we now forget to identify obvious robberies in plain sight. Like this intellectual construction for openly ripping you off of your money by calling something a 'fee' :)
> Ever notice how this discussion evolves consistently, like clockwork every time? This person/role looks like someone deserving of a tip -> Tipping is stupid, do it like Europe. -> Service in Europe sucks. -> That's just a different kind of service/What about Japan? -> You can't compare, that's a different culture.
It makes perfect sense when you view it in the broader theme of HN loving to demonstrate the "superiority" of European culture, oftentimes taking inconsistent stances on different issues in order to maintain that position.
What I find strange about tipping is that the employees get pissed of with the customer if he doesn't tip.
If I was in their shoes I would be pissed of with my employer for making "beg" the customers for getting my salary.
Imagine if as a software engineer I was told I would be paid half of what I am getting paid now, and for the other half I would have to go and ask for a "tip" from the end users. I would be absolutely furious.
The problem is that it's the norm in the US. If you have a service job (waiting tables, delivering pizza, etc) that's just how it works. You'd have to change the type of work you do because it doesn't differ much between employers.
It's very hard to unionize. I ran a pizzaria for about 10 years and was the owner operator it for another 5. The employment length of tipped employees typically is around 6 months. With people coming and going so quickly, it's hard to develop the bonds that allow such organizing.
It is terrible, but it's the system we have here in the US. I'd like to see it changed, but in practice, if I'm at a restaurant that expects a tip, I am nearly always going to give a 20% tip unless the service is really subpar. Some people would argue that's too high, but I've been out with one too many people here who have a "well, the waitress took too long to get my check to me or misread a menu special item, so cut her tip in half" attitude.
Personally, I tip people where their individual initiative and personal service makes a difference. A food delivery driver is supposed to get things to me very promptly and in very good condition. The Fedex driver is just following orders. As long as the box arrives that day and is more or less on my porch, it's fine.
No, I don't tip pizza delivery drivers. The whole tipping 'culture' here in the US is silly, and I refuse to take part unless an individual exceeds my expectations. Then they get a tip.
the local pizza shop does not belong to the richest guy in the world. the same richest guy who squeezes every drop of tax deductions and other inventives from the government to fun his business with my tax money.
With Whole Foods, Amazon could probably foot the bill for the tip themselves, with the excess price on just a few items. For instance, consider two 6 oz packs of non-organic blueberries that they charge $5 a pack for but that they could easily charge $3 a pack for. That's $4 on the two packs. Add some overpriced lettuce and some overpriced carrots, and you've exceeded the $5.
I don't spend money on any Amazon products or services at all these days, and if it was possible to spend negative money, I would.
Edit: forgot about AWS. I do spend money on Amazon stuff. Not much on my personal account, but some for clients.
How do you know they can make $2 on $5 organic blueberries in the winter that they have to ship in from Peru or Mexico? $5 is a typical price I see for organic at other stores as well.
This is the non-organic ones. The organic ones are 6 bucks. At another grocery store a mile away the non-organic ones are about one dollar per package right now. Shipping is cheap. The prices fluctuate but whole foods tends to keep it higher than what other stores charge when they're out of season, except when they're on sale. They go on sale based on the season but don't always go on sale when they're in season.
They would build a convenience or surcharge into it one way or another. A food delivery service near me adds a delivery fee, tip option, AND has drastically increased prices even compared to the restaurants normal delivery service. Passing it off as a tip is probably a way to make it less offensive to the American consumer who is used to tipping service people.
Exactly. Prime Now is the Instacart killer with respect to Whole Foods, not Amazon Fresh.
In the SF store where they first rolled it out you could literally see them just set up shelves and fridges upstairs and duplicate Instacart's model. Except for two advantages:
(a) Free 2 hour delivery to Prime members / absolutely no fees apart from tip.
(b) Better inventory data. This is huge. It's directly integrated with WF's logistics backend. It radically lowers the missing item / substitution problem that is the source of the worst outcomes with Instacart.
Having said that, all the other grocers are freaking out about this so there may still be a growth opportunity for Instacart.
Not to mention the biggest problem with Instacart—the prices they charge you are completely made up and not the grocery's price. I understand paying a flat fee for delivery, but certainly not random and opaque markups.
Well that's true sometimes but it depends on the store. Instacart actually matches in-store prices in certain stores. In the app these stores are noted as having "everyday store prices." If there's a markup it will say "view pricing policy" instead.
Their Whole Foods deal delivered everyday store prices so that's why I didn't list this as a difference. In SF Costco and Safeway have markups but for example Bi-Rite, Rainbow, Smart & Final and Mollie Stone's do not.
I know Instacart used to mark up everything and people hated it. So they've taken to hiding the cost somehow.. Maybe they're asking the smaller stores to take it out of their margins, and they just can't get Safeway & Costco to do it. Maybe they're tricking customers into paying a 10% markup with their "service fee". That fee reportedly does not get passed on to the workers and is optional but most customers probably don't realize this.
Amazon doesn't have as much of a cost problem here because they have the Prime membership fee, plus economies of scale.
> Maybe they're tricking customers into paying a 10% markup with their "service fee". That fee reportedly does not get passed on to the workers and is optional but most customers probably don't realize this.
Ha! “Optional service fee” sounds like the reverse of “mandatory tip.
Instacart and Shipt (who was recently acquired by Target) make money from the price slew between what they're paying (which, might not even be the cost that's on the grocery shelf -- it may be lower), and the price that they're charging you.
Yes, they have to pay the Shoppers a per-item fee, but, for the most part, the price that Insta is paying isn't the price that's listed on the shelf.
It's kind of a paradox. I can see what you're saying, but at the same time, I don't expect e.g. a retailer to be transparent with me about their supplier costs, and phrase their prices as "$2 unit wholesale cost, $0.50 retail storage fee."
The difference is that to get that $2/unit wholesale cost I need to buy 10k units and to get the regular price from the thing on Instacart I just need to go to the store. The latter feels far more achievable.
Is it possible by forcing this in the early term they may make tipping obsolete in the long run? It appears to remove any question of how much to tip... You won't have to think about it when the goods arrive... I wonder if in the long run I would prefer this towards an unknown expectation of the delivery person
Maybe I was not clear - the point that I was making the instacart killer is not a specific whole foods product. It is whole foods doing order picking/delivery using its own trained workforce that knows that specific store and is fully integrated into the logistics pipeline of WF. In the race to the bottom WF does not even need to charge more than a nominal fee for delivery with zero upcharge on the product (of course it would right now since Instacart showed that people will pay markups even for inferior service, which means they will definitely pay such markups for the superior service)
Where I live, Whole Foods tends to offer mid to high grade foods (for the middle class person at least). What makes you think it's low quality? I can get live mussels and clams, relatively ethical and fresh beef, good cheeses, decent produce... There are much worse options. Is Whole Foods not always like this?
I went to one in California (just North of Monterey as I recall) and it seemed nice enough too. I live in Canada though, so maybe in the rest of the US it's not so great.
Most places that are selling muscles, clams, or oysters on ice are selling live shellfish. In the US they are required to keep the tag and you can ask for it. The date of harvest and origin will be shown on it.
Speaking as a customer, the things I like about InstaCart are:
1. Reliable delivery time schedules available — usually today — or worst case tomorrow.
2. Service of multiple stores, so that we can get things from them we couldn’t get from Whole Foods.
One thing I dislike about InstaCart is when we order things like a half-gallon of refrigerated almond milk, and they instead give us the tetrapack quart of unrefrigerated almond milk. I specifically ordered the particular product and size I wanted, and I know the store has it in stock. So, why the fuck do you seem to think it’s okay to make random stupid substitutions like this?!?
I do appreciate the Whole Foods has a delivery service, and I trust that their pickers will do a better job of actually giving me what I ordered. But if I order it today, then I want it delivered today or tomorrow, and in a reasonable time window on that day. And don’t just leave the stuff on my front porch, like you do with packages.
I can't think of a grocery store chain that would want them. Albertsons/Safeway and Kroger both use Instacart and I don't think they would want to make the customers of the other chain mad, especially when many of them shop at both chains (they'd have so scale back or shut it down for their competitors - it wouldn't be sensible for one chain to act neutral and continue delivering at full steam for the other chains).
well i mean if they are running out of money and they can pick them up for cheap versus build their own might be a great buy. IE, Instacart is going to go out of business in 6 months and they pick it up for 150 million and get a great brand + tech to tie into their stores.
Yeah I think it will need to be clear that Instacart is shopping for a buyer and is going to die regardless, otherwise the customers and instacart drivers will be pissed off.
Why? It's not as amazing as it was a few years ago, but it's still a good enough deal to fit Matt Yglesias's description of it as "a charity run by Wall Street for the benefit of the American consumer".
Amazon raised the price of Prime, and so it was a good opportunity to question the value of it. Two day delivery is great but how often did I need something that quickly? Free delivery and ~5 days is fine. Prime Video seems to target baby boomers; there’s nothing that’s notable except for a few times a year when a hit movie appears and it certainly isn’t worth any amount to me. Amazon itself is a poor experience as I try to avoid doing business with unknown third parties. Whole Foods: after the acquisition I noticed that quality declined with brittle, smaller eggs and milk that expired sooner. Amazon hasn’t been in the best of light in the news in the past year or so. I remember a couple years ago thinking Amazon was the only respectable big tech company.
Then, there was a scheduled tissue package delivery that was “lost” by OnTrak. Amazon doesn’t automate the refund, you have to ask. Happened to be at Target and noticed that an 8 pack of 160 tissues each cost $12. I looked up amazon’s and it was $17 when bought, but all of a sudden it was now $13 — also only 120 tissues each box. Why the shadiness? It’s great that you have pricing power, but I wouldn’t want to do business with a coffee shop where I walk in and the barista says, “Bob’s here! Jack up the price!” Amazon feels like some legal version of Wolf of Wallstreet.
Anyway, it’s all just anecdotal. At the end of the day I just don’t trust them.
Edit: I’ve been off Prime 2 months and don’t miss it.
Also anecdotally, Prime has become inconsistent and unreliable since I moved to DC a couple of months ago. It's gotten better as we've moved closed to the holidays, but for a while it was taking 3-7 days for Prime-qualified items to arrive.
I heard that there may have been some disruptions in service due to the tornado hitting an Amazon warehouse in Baltimore, but never in my contact with customer service was this mentioned.
I think the data sharing is possibly a major problem-to-be in that Amazon probably getting a lot of info about me. A LOT. This is as I ramp down what I allow Google to know as I've taken steps to limit use of their products, particularly search. I think this should be people's primary concern with the rise of this service--especially as it now grows to include data on the foods you consume.
Presumably, Amazon will begin private labeling food products, which will put the company in direct line of choosing which farming practices to promote, what diets get discounted and other interesting capabilities. I want to believe this power will be used for good--such as Apple's stance toward Privacy. But benevolence can wax and wane.
I haven't heard Bezos talk about the importance of human health and the food chain, but I haven't gone looking for that yet either.
To me the delivery service via prime is still amazing. It does matter that products arrive within two days because I often put them into service the moment they are delivered.
It matters to me that the product catalog on Amazon is so expansive and has been combed over by previous buyers. The review system is not perfect, but largely I am happy with highly rated, well sold merchandise routed through Amazon's marketplace.
I also have been on the selling side of Prime and while it is expensive for sellers, it is an incredible to be able to address potential buyers using Prime with the branding and consistent experience of Amazon all over it. I'm able to sell unusual things with no reviews.
Regarding the issues you've had with that tissue delivery, I also had an issue once with a falsely advertised sizing of a ducting tube I needed for a swamp cooler a couple years back. I had to really get through to customer service to show that the product sold was not legit. They did take action on the seller after I spent the time.
That said, that was one out of many hundreds of product purchase experiences where I felt wronged and Amazon was involved.
I think we're still just getting started with the value prop of Amazon Prime.
In the UK, Prime has next day or (for major cities) same day delivery. I've used it plenty of times for things that I could get quickly from the supermarket or high-street shop but know Amazon will have a better quality or better price. I'm now living in Spain where Prime delivery takes a few days and miss it...
I'm finding Prime less and less competitive price-wise than places like Target. When items are directly comparable, the cost of "free" shipping appears to have been figured into the Amazon price.
They're also devaluing it with "this item is Prime, but may take 3-5 days to arrive" and their new in-house delivery, which has resulted in late packages (previously a very rare experience) for me three times in the last month.
I've been an Amazon customer since 1999, Prime since its debut, and this is the first year I've been questioning whether to renew or not.
The Prime branding on products that don’t deliver next day is a killer for me. (Note I’m in the U.K. where next day delivery is common and Prime started out with that as it’s pitch)
Amazons point of view seems to be that the products aren’t in stock, so when they do come in stock will be delivered next day, but as a customer I don’t care about stock levels or when it ships, it’s only the delivery date that matters.
I only really care about Prime over Christmas, when I could just shop in stores anyway, some will price match Amazon if necessary, and Amazon is no longer cheap anyway. I do care about Prime at work, but we have Amazon for Businesses for that.
I gave up my prime membership this month for a few reasons:
- the price raise got up over my utilization for shipping and I don't use the ancillary benefits more than the occasional prime video usage.
- the Amazon self shipping is horrendous. Lies about deliveries, much higher level of damage on boxes & crazy driver experiences made it so that every time one of those got selected I had a bad customer service experience. With non-prime delivery I can choose, with Prime it was up to some algo.
I feel like, if you never use Prime Video, you never use Prime Now, and you don't mind some extra clicking (and/or aren't price sensitive about shipping), I see how Prime might not be the best deal.
But Prime Now in particular has been extremely useful, especially for multi-day trips to different cities, where I can save myself a trip to a grocery store or drug store to get supplies.
Also: Prime Video is pretty solid! It's how you get to watch Patriot!
This was a key factor for us getting rid of Prime as well. Kept waiting for their service to improve or at least let me only have packages shipped via major carriers. Unfortunately, neither option was available.
It's also crappy that you don't get access to the best sale prices without a Prime membership. That's why I've stopped shopping at Whole Foods. I get access to the best price at every other grocery store without having to pay a monthly fee for it. Luckily there's a good Wegman's that just opened near me.
That's correct. I have additional reasons I don't want to give Amazon my business, but I don't see enough value in joining those based only on the membership fees.
I sort of like what Amazon is trying to do, but until they start paying their delivery drivers livable wages, I refuse to buy anything from the company. Jeff Bezos is the richest person in human history, and he's employing like 100K people at laughable wages. I dunno -- I just don't want anything to do with that.
There is absolutely nothing in the article suggesting that Instacart is developing their own supply chain. They are focused on partnering with retailers to provide this soon-to-be-standard delivery amenity.
They are differentiating themselves from Postmates in this respect. Instacart's positioning is as a trusted partner who won't try to compete with a grocer and eat away at their most profitable categories.
I think the parent comment was sarcastically implying that of course Whole Foods is going to deliver their own groceries now that they are part of Amazon.
Amazon Fresh: This was their pre-acquisition play and has a lot of items not sourced from Whole Foods, and some items that are, but you won't find items like Whole Foods store made sandwiches.
Prime Now - Amazon: This is more like extremely fast(1 to 2 hours) shipping for a very limited set of Amazon.com items. Has a few fresh grocery items but the range is quite limited.
Prime Now - Whole Foods: You can only order items that are present at a central Whole Foods location. Directly competes with Instacart
The only time I used Instacart was to order from Costco. That was until I found jet.com. I will go to jet before amazon now, it is super easy ordering groceries from them, probably my biggest pain living in Manhattan. Haven't had any problems and they always drop the bags off outside my door (In a walk up apartment in Manhattan).
Where I live, Whole Foods tends to offer mid to high grade foods (for the middle class person at least). What makes you think it's low quality? I can get live mussels and clams, relatively ethical and fresh beef, good cheeses, decent produce... There are much worse options. Is Whole Foods not always like this?
I went to one in California (just North of Monterey as I recall) and it seemed nice enough too. I live in Canada though, so maybe in the rest of the US it's not so great.
Whole Foods' quality has definitely taken a massive hit post Amazon acquisition. The most obvious place I've noticed it is the Bakery, the produce has less diversity as well. I've also noticed more empty shelves in the processed food aisles.
Whole Foods' quality has definitely taken a massive hit post Amazon acquisition. The most obvious place I've noticed it is the Bakery, the produce has less diversity as well. I've also noticed more empty shelves in the processed food aisles.
I noticed this as well, and stopped shopping at Whole Foods. Then I went back in this week to pick up a package at one of the Amazon lockers, and it looks like Amazon's getting its act together.
No more empty shelves. No more disorganized aisles. No more confused staff. It seemed like the Whole Foods of old, except that for some reason there was a rack selling yoga pants by the oranges.
It puzzled me and I stood there trying to figure out if the placement was deliberate, or accidental. Then a woman came up and took a pair. So, I guess it works, I just don't understand it.
I have seen Whole Foods change from a welcoming, organized, on-trend, curated grocery store to something different. I frequent Whole Foods in the midwest and west coast. There is more homogenization, empty aisles, different employees, and different food stuffs. I can't [quantitatively] say the food quality is down per se, but the feeling of visiting and purchasing at the store is less positive than before. The only section that I didn't see massive change was in the meat department. I still see the same employees and what looks like the same meats.
I now avoid Whole Foods and go towards more speciality stores or direct competitors like Erewhon.
More like "free". Amazon preselects $5 tip for the delivery. I don't have to tip the FedEx driver, why should I tip this delivery driver? It's not free if I'm expected to tip.
Pay your workers a living wage and build it into the price.
Servers make 2-3x what kitchen staff do, sometimes even better. Even on the very worst nights in the cheapest restaurants I’ve never seen a server come away with less than kitchen staff. Cash tips are also often underreported.
Good nights can be absolutely fantastic. I’ve earned an entire 40 hour kitchen check in three hours waiting tables.
Kitchen staff wouldn’t mind, managers wouldn’t mind, probably even owners wouldn’t mind so much, but servers would be mass protesting if you eliminated tipping. They want you to raise their employer-paid wage, sure. Affordable health insurance would be great. But they absolutely do not want an end to tipping.
And no, no employer is going to pay servers what they’d make with tips on an average night, and even if they did, kitchen staff would go on strike unless they got it too. And then you’re looking at food prices skyrocketing.
Don't you find it curious how the rest of the world can manage this situation without tipping?
It's like credit cards and mobile payments. Why has India and China embraced mobile payments so much more than the west? Because they never had credit cards! The delta between paying in currency and paying with a mobile phone is vastly greater than the delta of paying with a credit card vs a mobile phone. So the places which had credit cards in the past, mobile payments are not as ubiquitous as in China or India.
The starting point is extremely important.
If you don’t want to tip, don’t. Believe me, not everyone tips. I’m not sure what the real problem with it (the wage issue, at least for restaurants, is a red herring$ other than it makes some people who dislike social interactions uncomfortable.
1. It offsets labor cost to the generosity of customers, putting an employee's take-home in the hands of the customer.
2. This creates an interaction with the staff where they have incentive to try obtaining an additional ambiguous amount of money from the customer.
3. Sometimes this means being overly characteristic, other times it means trying upsell you to raise the total amount, effectively raising their tip.
4. Other countries reject tipping because they want their employees giving you 100% service regardless of a tip incentive (because there is none). In America, good tippers are treated better by staff (especially at bars, think stronger drinks), while bad tippers get what they get (not something you want from a food serving establishment: watch the movie Waiting and try telling me foregoing tipping is a good idea).
Tipping is an abomination of a custom that we should reject as a society.
But the customers are not obligated to tip (and some don't), giving them the option of cheaper food, and employees make a much higher average wage than they would otherwise.
There's no way this is a negative.
> 2. This creates an interaction with the staff where they have incentive to try obtaining an additional ambiguous amount of money from the customer.
> 3. Sometimes this means being overly characteristic, other times it means trying upsell you to raise the total amount, effectively raising their tip
Sure. If you have a really high care factor on a particular day you'll try to be nicer and work a little harder than you might otherwise. Most days you really don't put any more effort into it than you would in the kitchen. It's a job. I'm not seeing why this is a problem. And certainly upselling is going to be encouraged by management regardless of whether you get tips!
As an aside, even though establishments (and servers, naturally) encourage it, I don't believe in tipping based on the size of the bill. I tip based on three factors: 1) how many people are in the party b) how long we were there and iii) how much I like the server.
> while bad tippers get what they get (not something you want from a food serving establishment: watch the movie Waiting and try telling me foregoing tipping is a good idea).
In general, watching movies to understand real behavior is not well-advised. If you are a regular, and recognized as such, and known to be a good tipper, you will most likely get better service. If you are a regular and stiff the server, 99% of the time you just get average service and a server complaining behind your back. Nobody, as a rule, messes with your food. I am saying this with not only the confidence of someone who did that kind of work for years, but as someone who now will quite readily stiff a server that I don't think deserves a tip. If you're eating at the kind of place where people would screw with your order because of your tipping, they're going to screw with it for other arbitrary reasons too.
> Tipping is an abomination of a custom that we should reject as a society.
Your "important reasons" seem a little specious. I get the feeling your main reason is you don't like doing it for some personal reason, but you're afraid of the social consequences if you don't. Look, if you don't like it, leave a perfunctory tip or none at all. I paid for most of my degree with cash earned from waiting tables. It's one of the best options available to people in the lower and middle classes who need flexible schedules and have no skills. There are a lot of people who don't tip. It won't hurt anyone's feelings too much, and will certainly generate less eye-rolling than the people who leave religious pamphlets or advertisements as a "tip."
Our inner thread has reached it's max depth, so I'm replying here. We'll probably have to end this conversion because of that, so here's my final response:
> But the customers are not obligated to tip
> If you are a regular and stiff the server, 99% of the time you just get average service and a server complaining behind your back.
> There's no way this is a negative.
So you're telling me if I'm a regular at a spot and I want to strictly pay the required amount for (food+environment+service) and nothing more, then I should accept "average service" and being complained about in the kitchen? That's exactly how you lose regular customers.
> If you have a really high care factor on a particular day you'll try to be nicer and work a little harder than you might otherwise.
Employees should be just as nice and work just as hard as the employer asks them, because that's their job. The people with the money (employers and customers) make the rules, not the worker.
> If you are a regular, and recognized as such, and known to be a good tipper, you will most likely get better service.
This is exactly the behavior we're trying to stop. Service should always be good.
> Nobody, as a rule, messes with your food. If you're eating at the kind of place where people would screw with your order because of your tipping, they're going to screw with it for other arbitrary reasons too.
I know several people who've either been first-hand responsible or been whiteness to others performing gross things to people's food. This is edge-case for sure, but still a reality.
> your main reason is you don't like doing it for some personal reason, but you're afraid of the social consequences if you don't.
My main reasons are:
A) tips are taxed and aren't the "gift" people think they are. This is how the government allows employers to reduce a workers minimum wage down to like, $2.xx or something, and you won't find any worker who is happy about that, only employers and government.
B) it creates a favorites-game between employees and customers, not something I'm interested in as a customer. The only people who like that system are people who get the benefits from it. Those who get screwed, get screwed.
C) This standard doesn't span the entire service industry, and wait staff have no special place in my heart that the rest of the industry doesn't also have.
Also, why do you say "stiff" when referring to someone paying the full and complete amount of their meal and service? To 'stiff' literally means to cheat or steal. As you say, the customer is not obliged in any way to pay more. Using this term is bully tactics, telling people that not paying extra makes them bad in some way.
---
I've realized that the problem here simply lies in which perspective we value more. Do we accept that the customer should help pay the wage of the worker with a taxed donation, or do we accept that the customer should have an easy flat price absent from favoritism?
Certainly not in traditionally tipped industries like restaurant servers where tipping culture is strong. The new jobs that employers are trying to make tipped may not have the same feature, especially those which both already have a service charge and try to push tipping. OTOH, maybe the tip pushing is more successful than I think.
This exactly. When the minimum wage was created in the 30s, tipped workers were exempt if they could amass an identical wage from tips, a system some states still use. This is nothing more than business owners offsetting the cost of labor onto the generosity of customers.
I'm a NYC native, and I tip because I realize that the system is rigged to enable food and entertainment employers to take advantage of there employees. Yea, I don't like it either. But it's here so I just roll with it.
And tipping is offsetting that burden to the customer.
So, I guess its time for an episode of “Dragonwriter Ruins Adam Ruins Everything”.
Americans imported the practice of tipping from Europe just after the civil war (some accounts say as an excuse for restaurant owners not to pay newly-freed blacks working as servers, but that's less than clear, though where such workers were common, it was certainly leveraged for that purpose), and there was criticism of the new but rapidly-spreading practice as unamerican and pro-aristocratic in the late 19th Century, before prohibition.
Heck, here's a pre-Prohibition (1916) book about the practice of tipping in America, which even recounts past legislative efforts to stop it:
http://www.gutenberg.org/files/33170/33170-h/33170-h.htm
So, no, it didn't start in response to Prohibition.
all while making the client be the jerk.
I was seriously confused why our waters werent getting filled up, despite walking 10+ miles before noon. Or why the waiter wasnt coming to our table to take our order. Or why the waiter didn't check on us.
After sharing this story with locals, it seems their expectations are far less for restaurants.
I don't have much of an opinion on how to pay waiters, but Italy did not impress me.
In the countries I've travelled to, I've generally had excellent service, bearing the above in mind.
This is a straw man. Nobody in the US expects this - and in fact, it's rare that this even happens. At most the server will "interrupt" you once once your food arrives to check in, and even that varies by restaurant.
> In many countries, customers expect to be left alone until they signal the wait staff for something
I think you're missing what people are talking about when they talk about "terrible or slow service" in Europe. It's not that they wait for you to signal to them, but that they take so long to appear where you can find them in the first place, and that once you do grab their attention, they still take ages to actually come and serve you. They're not necessarily doing anything important or urgent (chatting idly with their coworkers, wiping down the bar, what have you), and it's eminently clear that they simply don't view providing prompt and effective service to customers as their priority.
I could give countless stories of how slow and inefficient service in Europe tends to be, or even how downright rude servers can be.
For the record, yes, this is a strictly European phenomenon. There are plenty of other places in the world (both where tipping is expected and where it isn't) where this is not an issue.
I live in the North East, and not only does a typical experience involve frequent table visits, it is an increasingly popular topic when discussing restaurants and sharing or writing reviews. People will raise it before mentioning the food!
My experience is that is closer to a (frequently exceeded) minimum in US restaurants offering full table service than a maximum (except for the rare case where the server completely disappears and neither checks nor can be summoned without accosting a busser or some other server, but those are presumably employee failures and not restaurant practice.)
Host seats you
Waiter delivers menus, asks if you want drinks
Waiter returns with drinks, asks if you're ready to order, and if not, comes back 5 min later
Waiter delivers food
Waiter comes back in 5 minutes to make sure it's to your liking
Waiter comes back to ask if you want dessert, and if not, hands you the bill.
If you've taken a long time to eat, they may return once or twice to keep your drinks topped off.
That's it. It's formulaic and quite standard. In my decades of living in various states, I've never had an experience like I see EU folk on here complain about.
Waiter returns with drinks, asks if you're ready to order, and if not, comes back 5 min later
Waiter delivers food
Waiter comes back in 5 minutes to make sure it's to your liking
Waiter comes back to ask if you want dessert, and if not, hands you the bill. >
Which in certain places is precisely too much? What is considered to be minimal and norm by some, is too much by others.
I will ask for Drinks,
I will ask to place orders,
I will ask for desert when I want to,
I will tell you if the food is bad, or more like I will not tell you and leave it on the plate.
Don't come and talk to me with small talks, I am enjoying my time with my guest.
And I will ask for bills
The only thing the waiter have to do is to keep an eye on the table from time to time because he or she should know what the stages of that table is up to.
You see, that is the difference with expectation. Push and Pull. Americans expect the Services to be Pushed to them, while many others expect services only when asked, Pull. ( I wish I could think of a HTTP jokes here )
As to the tipping culture, in some places it is absolutely insulting to tip.
And no, A Glass of water is not a standard part of services before you ask.
GP did.
The worst service I've ever had was in Canada where they do tip, and I was rating that by the North American standards rather than my home country's. I still tipped the standard amount because I disagree with tipping, but he didn't seem incentivised.
It's important to rate experiences by what the region is expecting, not by what you expect at home.
Where I am living currently, I think there is more income equality - partly I believe is because of having more or less good wages despite line of work, and you get treated like how someone would normally treat you without being forced upon with the expectation of a tip.
Then you go to Japan, where the service is dramatically better than the US, and you realize that they don't expect tips, either...
It WAS a Michelan-Starred restaurant and our two-person bill was $800 with a $200 tip!
“How to Read and Do Proofs: An Introduction to Mathematical Thought Processes”
https://www.amazon.com/How-Read-Proofs-Introduction-Mathemat...
Waiters working for tips leads to a territorial approach to customers and leads to an awkward dynamic where they aren't focused on good service but rather the impression of good service required for the tip.
I'm on the European side of things so I do not want to be approached while eating. I want to flag the waiter whenever I want something and I absolutely hate fake small talk in order to drive the tip up. It feels so artificial and not genuine (and happened often enough in the US).
I do like small talks with waiters that are genuine but having the possibility of a tip kind of destroys that.
To be fair though, waiters in touristy places everywhere suck. So that might also be the issue if you went to a tourist hole instead of a restaurant for locals.
Unlike the US, waiters don't bug you every 30 seconds, and I consider that a feature. You actually have to ask for things you want, and you signal to a waiter when you want something. Unless you found an exceptionally shitty restaurant, they'll almost always come right over.
Try Eastern Europe. You are expected to tip, and the service is usually atrociously slow (and not necessarily good in any other way either). Bad service culture is bad service culture. Where I live waiters are expected to perform their jobs properly just like everyone else.
The idea that you should grovel and always defer to your boss because they're kind enough to employ you is something I've only seen from Americans.
Because that's the reality — most of us can be fired at any time for any reason.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/At-will_employment
Oddly, imported fairly late in American history from Europe.
Where did you get that idea?
Just a quick glance at the Wiki article on tipping shows that tipping shows up in plenty of places outside of America.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gratuity
This person/role looks like someone deserving of a tip ->
Tipping is stupid, do it like Europe. ->
Service in Europe sucks. ->
That's just a different kind of service/What about Japan? ->
You can't compare, that's a different culture.
It makes perfect sense when you view it in the broader theme of HN loving to demonstrate the "superiority" of European culture, oftentimes taking inconsistent stances on different issues in order to maintain that position.
If I was in their shoes I would be pissed of with my employer for making "beg" the customers for getting my salary.
Imagine if as a software engineer I was told I would be paid half of what I am getting paid now, and for the other half I would have to go and ask for a "tip" from the end users. I would be absolutely furious.
I don't spend money on any Amazon products or services at all these days, and if it was possible to spend negative money, I would.
Edit: forgot about AWS. I do spend money on Amazon stuff. Not much on my personal account, but some for clients.
In the SF store where they first rolled it out you could literally see them just set up shelves and fridges upstairs and duplicate Instacart's model. Except for two advantages:
(a) Free 2 hour delivery to Prime members / absolutely no fees apart from tip.
(b) Better inventory data. This is huge. It's directly integrated with WF's logistics backend. It radically lowers the missing item / substitution problem that is the source of the worst outcomes with Instacart.
Having said that, all the other grocers are freaking out about this so there may still be a growth opportunity for Instacart.
Their Whole Foods deal delivered everyday store prices so that's why I didn't list this as a difference. In SF Costco and Safeway have markups but for example Bi-Rite, Rainbow, Smart & Final and Mollie Stone's do not.
I know Instacart used to mark up everything and people hated it. So they've taken to hiding the cost somehow.. Maybe they're asking the smaller stores to take it out of their margins, and they just can't get Safeway & Costco to do it. Maybe they're tricking customers into paying a 10% markup with their "service fee". That fee reportedly does not get passed on to the workers and is optional but most customers probably don't realize this.
Amazon doesn't have as much of a cost problem here because they have the Prime membership fee, plus economies of scale.
Ha! “Optional service fee” sounds like the reverse of “mandatory tip.
Yes, they have to pay the Shoppers a per-item fee, but, for the most part, the price that Insta is paying isn't the price that's listed on the shelf.
1. Reliable delivery time schedules available — usually today — or worst case tomorrow.
2. Service of multiple stores, so that we can get things from them we couldn’t get from Whole Foods.
One thing I dislike about InstaCart is when we order things like a half-gallon of refrigerated almond milk, and they instead give us the tetrapack quart of unrefrigerated almond milk. I specifically ordered the particular product and size I wanted, and I know the store has it in stock. So, why the fuck do you seem to think it’s okay to make random stupid substitutions like this?!?
I do appreciate the Whole Foods has a delivery service, and I trust that their pickers will do a better job of actually giving me what I ordered. But if I order it today, then I want it delivered today or tomorrow, and in a reasonable time window on that day. And don’t just leave the stuff on my front porch, like you do with packages.
Then, there was a scheduled tissue package delivery that was “lost” by OnTrak. Amazon doesn’t automate the refund, you have to ask. Happened to be at Target and noticed that an 8 pack of 160 tissues each cost $12. I looked up amazon’s and it was $17 when bought, but all of a sudden it was now $13 — also only 120 tissues each box. Why the shadiness? It’s great that you have pricing power, but I wouldn’t want to do business with a coffee shop where I walk in and the barista says, “Bob’s here! Jack up the price!” Amazon feels like some legal version of Wolf of Wallstreet.
Anyway, it’s all just anecdotal. At the end of the day I just don’t trust them.
Edit: I’ve been off Prime 2 months and don’t miss it.
I heard that there may have been some disruptions in service due to the tornado hitting an Amazon warehouse in Baltimore, but never in my contact with customer service was this mentioned.
https://www.reddit.com/r/washingtondc/comments/9xebhs/any_up...
Presumably, Amazon will begin private labeling food products, which will put the company in direct line of choosing which farming practices to promote, what diets get discounted and other interesting capabilities. I want to believe this power will be used for good--such as Apple's stance toward Privacy. But benevolence can wax and wane.
I haven't heard Bezos talk about the importance of human health and the food chain, but I haven't gone looking for that yet either.
To me the delivery service via prime is still amazing. It does matter that products arrive within two days because I often put them into service the moment they are delivered.
It matters to me that the product catalog on Amazon is so expansive and has been combed over by previous buyers. The review system is not perfect, but largely I am happy with highly rated, well sold merchandise routed through Amazon's marketplace.
I also have been on the selling side of Prime and while it is expensive for sellers, it is an incredible to be able to address potential buyers using Prime with the branding and consistent experience of Amazon all over it. I'm able to sell unusual things with no reviews.
Regarding the issues you've had with that tissue delivery, I also had an issue once with a falsely advertised sizing of a ducting tube I needed for a swamp cooler a couple years back. I had to really get through to customer service to show that the product sold was not legit. They did take action on the seller after I spent the time.
That said, that was one out of many hundreds of product purchase experiences where I felt wronged and Amazon was involved.
I think we're still just getting started with the value prop of Amazon Prime.
My mum was mad at me for paying for 1 day shipping (eg Prime Delivery - 20€ in Spain - crazy cheap) because "You know that this won't work in Spain!!"
They're also devaluing it with "this item is Prime, but may take 3-5 days to arrive" and their new in-house delivery, which has resulted in late packages (previously a very rare experience) for me three times in the last month.
I've been an Amazon customer since 1999, Prime since its debut, and this is the first year I've been questioning whether to renew or not.
Amazons point of view seems to be that the products aren’t in stock, so when they do come in stock will be delivered next day, but as a customer I don’t care about stock levels or when it ships, it’s only the delivery date that matters.
I only really care about Prime over Christmas, when I could just shop in stores anyway, some will price match Amazon if necessary, and Amazon is no longer cheap anyway. I do care about Prime at work, but we have Amazon for Businesses for that.
I suspect I’ll let me Prime subscription lapse.
- the price raise got up over my utilization for shipping and I don't use the ancillary benefits more than the occasional prime video usage.
- the Amazon self shipping is horrendous. Lies about deliveries, much higher level of damage on boxes & crazy driver experiences made it so that every time one of those got selected I had a bad customer service experience. With non-prime delivery I can choose, with Prime it was up to some algo.
But Prime Now in particular has been extremely useful, especially for multi-day trips to different cities, where I can save myself a trip to a grocery store or drug store to get supplies.
Also: Prime Video is pretty solid! It's how you get to watch Patriot!
This was a key factor for us getting rid of Prime as well. Kept waiting for their service to improve or at least let me only have packages shipped via major carriers. Unfortunately, neither option was available.
I take it you don't go to Costco or Sam's Club?
Every large company can produce at least some anecdotes like that, but with Amazon it's much more of a pattern, part of their identity.
They are differentiating themselves from Postmates in this respect. Instacart's positioning is as a trusted partner who won't try to compete with a grocer and eat away at their most profitable categories.
Amazon Fresh: This was their pre-acquisition play and has a lot of items not sourced from Whole Foods, and some items that are, but you won't find items like Whole Foods store made sandwiches.
Prime Now - Amazon: This is more like extremely fast(1 to 2 hours) shipping for a very limited set of Amazon.com items. Has a few fresh grocery items but the range is quite limited.
Prime Now - Whole Foods: You can only order items that are present at a central Whole Foods location. Directly competes with Instacart
And while PrimeNow has been steadily catching up to Instacart, Instacart is still significantly better in many ways.
I went to one in California (just North of Monterey as I recall) and it seemed nice enough too. I live in Canada though, so maybe in the rest of the US it's not so great.
I noticed this as well, and stopped shopping at Whole Foods. Then I went back in this week to pick up a package at one of the Amazon lockers, and it looks like Amazon's getting its act together.
No more empty shelves. No more disorganized aisles. No more confused staff. It seemed like the Whole Foods of old, except that for some reason there was a rack selling yoga pants by the oranges.
It puzzled me and I stood there trying to figure out if the placement was deliberate, or accidental. Then a woman came up and took a pair. So, I guess it works, I just don't understand it.
That totally seems like the Whole Foods of old to me.
https://www.businessinsider.com/whole-foods-employees-reveal...
I now avoid Whole Foods and go towards more speciality stores or direct competitors like Erewhon.