/Gonna go play that game now.

One car making ten stops on one delivery trip is massively more efficient than ten cars making one stop on one pickup trip, plus under the delivery model there’s no need for a supermarket in the first place – all deliveries can be made directly from the warehouse, rather than using the supermarket as an intermediary point between business and consumer.

Unless I’m just supposed to schedule my life around the convenience of the food delivery service. “Sorry boss I can’t come in to work today, I have to sit at home because my food is going to be delivered sometime between 8 AM and 8 PM.”

On the other hand, I just got back from a major conference with municipal politicians from all over Ontario, and I am fairly certain most of them either don’t believe in global climate change or won’t allow themselves to change their behaviour because of it. They are still approving crazy development that makes car-dependency inevitable, even if it hurts them in more direct ways than GCC (like the massive infrastructure maintenance costs they are paying out). A lot of people in the provincial government are just as bad (“a 4-lane divided highway from Ottawa all the way to Kenora, that’s what this province really needs”) and I can’t even start with the feds.

We need to start with basic upgrades to rail service to make it practical for more intercity trips within the continent. We don’t even need real high speed rail; 200 kph with reliable service would start changing things, and that’s doable with existing fixed infrastructure (the next person who says “mag-lev” gets horsewhipped). Air travel on trips of 600 km or less has to end, period.

They seem to be doing ok, as I see deliveries made by their vehicles about as often as I see pizza deliveries (this is a middle class* neighborhood….)

If a prepared foods business can make a go of it, I wonder if a food delivery service would fly**…

Something to invest my future lottery winnings in***.

*real middle class (approx $50K income, not McCain “Middle Class” of $3 milllion)
**Fly by ZEPPELIN!
*** Probably a money loser, like most new businesses, but better than the traditional Florida Lottery winner investment plan of strippers and booze.

The concept is intriguing and the theory is inspiring, but the folks launching this thing look like guys operating out of their parents’ basement. When Boeing or Airbus gives this a serious look, we might be in business. For now, I just don’t think you realize the level of technical expertise required to make a real reliable flying machine.

Yes, but what I am saying is that this hurdle has already been cleared — at least in New York. FreshDirect is extremely popular and successful. All of the local brick-and-mortar grocery stores are scrambling to offer comparable service. So there is an actual working model that you can point to and say, “Okay, here’s what works — let’s do it like this.”

Ok, touche. I was going with a model akin to the PeaPod program that my local grocery store put out about five years back. It bombed because the premiums were too high, the delivery times were too long, and the general consensus was that food delivered to your door wasn’t as good as the food you could pick up yourself.

“– Yeah, there are a lot of things that could go wrong with grocery delivery. There are a lot of ways companies could do it badly. There are legitmate concerns about how the FreshDirect model woud scale to other markets. But these are all, for the moment, purely theoretical concerns. –”

Purely theoretical concerns are a rather big deal when you want to raise capital for a business project. And since this is a purely theoretical discussion – unless anyone has a few million in spare cash sitting around to invest – I’m just saying what I’m saying.

A new delivery model of groceries doesn’t just have to work. It has to be so much better than the current system that people will voluntarily give up the weekly commute. That’s the hurdle you have to make it over in order to succeed. So all these problem – theoretical or otherwise – are, in fact, a big deal.