It was the great thinkers of our time 3OH!3 who once said “Tell your boyfriend if he says he’s got beef,
that I’m a vegetarian and I ain’t f****** scared of him” and never were truer words spoken. However, it may now be even easier for the aforementioned boyfriend to obtain his beef with which to threaten human-herbivores as Amazon have lifted the moratorium on their new grocery delivery service, still in beta, in the UK to compete with supermarkets.
Amazon has not, though, opened a warehouse of their own produce, and instead the service will simply be a middleman between retailers, suppliers (and people who have a festering old can of tuna stashed away) and the consumer. Much as you can buy practically any item on Amazon from other sellers, often at a lower price like the infamous 1 penny books, the grocery department will be the first to list items exclusively available from third party sellers. Though no official confirmation has been given, the online retailer’s normal procedure of delivering goods through the post will likely be used in this service also.
Obviously, home grocery delivery is relatively old hat as practically every big UK supermarket has it in some form, but this is the first attempt by an already established exclusively-online store to do so. Ocado is currently the only other web-only service of this type, albeit with only moderate success, while Tesco, Asda and Sainsburys (to name but a few) have been running these services parallel to their brick-and-mortar stores for years. The first attempt to make a service like this work was Webvan in 1999, which went bankrupt in 2001 (though resurrected by Amazon themselves last year, presumebly as a precursor for this) and was described by CNET as one of the greatest dotcom disasters in history, probably just after the dotcom bubble burst and the continuing existence of Fred.
Though this sounds disgustingly like a fat-man’s eBay, it’s actually an interesting (if a little bit odd) exploration of the concept of The Long Tail. A Web 2.0 model that describes the capacity for exclusively-online stores to stock less popular products (“niches”) as well as the bracket of the most popular products (“hits”) as webspace and bandwidth costs are, more or less, negligible, whereas brick-and-mortar stores have limited shelf-space so much inhibit themselves to the “hits”. It’ll be interesting to see what manner of rare, unusual or plain weird foods will become available on such a well known company’s website once it begins democratising the trade of groceries, have you ever tried sauerkraut?
Presumebly this is only the first step in a new laziness-paradigm, all we need now is a legion of domestic robots, mass-marketing of Steven Hawking’s infra-red ‘blink switch’ computer controls and some sort of food to mouth interface for the Disney classic Wall-E to become eerily prophetic.
That’s it, now go wash your hands – the postman’s here.
Tags: Amazon, Dotcom burst, Fred, Grocery, lazy, Ocado, Tesco, The Long Tail, Wall-E, Webvan