It may not be failure but I doubt it will kill or disrupt the grocery business.
Items are well packed but not excessively (Google Express once sent me a bubble-wrapped bottle in a giant box for when I just ordered peanut butter - talk about waste).
Frozen items have cooling packs that are reusable and recyclable (pure ice + plastic skin) - and (this was actually useful) frozen drinking water bottles (useful packaging!)
The quality of the groceries were good. Unlike Safeway where sometimes I got what looked like older veggies.
My (more extensive) experiences with both Google Express and Safeway were inferior in little ways. I want to hate Amazon, but they're doing great for grocery delivery.
There won't be wide adoption until the customer gets a perfect order with no substitutions or blemishes every time. The psychology of perceived loss at not getting EXACTLY what was ordered is too great. Until then millions of disappointed people will discourage others.
This is pretty much exactly what I would do if I was at a job where: 1) I didn't care at all and it was temporary 2) I'm also getting paid nothing to do it. So I can't really fault the delivery people in this situation.
The TL;DR is that there is just no margin when it comes to food. Grocery, restaurants, meal kits, etc. People keep trying to deliver these experiences to your home, and having spent 5 years cooking in a restaurant and my entire childhood growing up on a farm I've reached the conclusion that it can't be done. Once you add in the cost of human labor for physical delivery, the margins go from slim to negative.
I think you (and I) might be in the minority here and not their intended market. I don't know anyone with experience cooking who would prefer any meal or grocery delivery services over just doing it themselves. They're probably only focused on the market whose only previous alternative is instant/frozen meals or takeout.
To us: Shitty delivery + mediocre quality = Net negative
To their intended market: Delivery on par with take out + quality that's better than take out = Net positive
A very convenient experience, and it gets a lot of people doing the order online.
Once you have that, and if you can convince people to get their orders at a fixed weekly window, you get delivery density, which is key at lowering shipping costs.
And as far making delivery times convenient in this method - you need to loan your customers a passively chilled box they can put on their porch, so they can pick the deliveries when they come home.
Maybe Amazon could have done this while skipping pickup. But since it's less convenient , it's hard to convince people to pay more, and maybe competitors are cheaper.
But going straight away to on-demand deliveries, with 2 hour delivery time? Sure, that's crazy.
