What countries have widespread online grocery shopping? I've seen it advertised a bit in the US (more and more recently), but haven't seen it gain a strong foothold yet. I've had some friends that used Amazon Fresh. I've used it once or twice, but wasn't confident it was price competitive and also didn't want to wait the day or two when I could just pick it up for dinner tonight. For me it's just an expectation and familiarity thing (I get confused about all the Amazon services and forget that most of them exist).

I've heard some people talk about why grocery delivery "won't work" in the US. There's a huge last-mile problem. For the first few years, Blue Apron was northern east-coast, then west-coast only. It took awhile to get most states covered. Another argument I've heard is that people like to pick their food. They're worried they'll get stuck with blemished/bruised food.

Online grocery delivery is fairly widespread in the US at least in the general vicinity of urban areas. I've had Peapod available for over ten years in the Northeast even though I'm far enough out of Boston that I don't get most of the delivery service things.

However, the only time I've used it was when I had a broken foot and, while I could drive to the store or pick up one or two things, doing a grocery shopping was difficult.

At least at the time, they'd invariably be out of something I needed for a recipe and/or they'd make substitutions that weren't really what I would have wanted. Quality was "OK." Normally, it's not a big deal for me to go to the store and I just didn't love the service in general.

In UK all the big chains give you the option for online delivery. The quality is not a problem and it’s fairly easy to switch to a competitor in case it is. Edit: Ah Amazon fresh is simply not working as a food delivery service. They handle the trolley like a normal amazon order, it’s not optimised for tens of items, they mess up a lot of orders and the refund workflow is simply ridiculous. If you only ever used Amazon fresh for grocery shopping then I can understand your issues.

The problem with online groceries is lack of control over quality. Particularly fresh fruits, meats, etc - they'll grab what's on top, as far as I can tell. This is usually the fruit that's bruised, leafy vegetables that are wilted, the meat that's closest to date, etc.

Our local store's online service is actually one of the better ones I've tried in terms of finding things and getting the task done - but they fail in quality at the end.

We buy a box that specifically is sourced in our local area. Online grocery shopping solves the 'trip to the store' but doesn't solve meal planning, sourcing local ingredients, managing a shopping list, etc.

Right now, the cost of my box includes all those steps. It also occasionally includes locally sourced meat, fish, dairy, or eggs. I can find information on the farms where those items came from easily.

I value that service enough to pay a small premium for it.

Most of the online grocery delivery shops give you food from local producers, all of them must indicate the origin, at least in uk. For some recipes you can’t have local produce, by definition. Your box doesn’t solve the trip to the store because you still need to buy household stuff, breakfast food and all the other stuff that you use daily that is not sold by blue apron or these kind of services. The premium doesn’t seem small to me given that is 2-3x a grocery store, at least in case of blue apron... I don’t think that there is a huge market for people that don’t want to click a couple times more to add the ingredients for a recipe (or actually just a click if you add it once in a shopping list), that are willing to pay a premium but that still need to go to the grocery store for the normal shopping and do all the cooking.

"This solved a problem for me, and I found it valuable."

"No, you're wrong, it'd didn't solve that problem for you."

Wat? I'm able to evaluate a cost benefit scenario in the context of my own life quite adequately. The stuff we need from the store these days is staples, which we buy rarely in bulk.

I said that I don’t think that there are many people that benefit from this scenario for the reasons that I wrote. If you benefit from it being aware of the alternatives of course you can use it.

> Meal planning is work. Grocery shopping is work.

There's definitely a time limit to this. As you get better at cooking, you get better at thinking of recipes that don't have ingredients that quickly spoil, and/or can be cooked from frozen, or can be frozen after cooking, or can be portioned out as part (let's say) half the meals you cook this week.

These habits accumulate, they don't appear all at once. Worse for a service like blue apron: cooking a lot of new recipes fosters that sort of thinking.

I think an important perspective to remember is that most styles of cooking were come up with by people who didn't have refrigeration, although they weren't as fragmented as we are (lots of single people and couples due to capitalist alienation.) When you tighten the constraint of the number of people being cooked for while loosening the constraint of how long ingredients will last and how long things you cook can be saved (without changing the taste much e.g. pickling and drying), things come out about even.