Tell HN: All you delivery startups – please reinvigorate community retail

[hoodoof]

Seems to me all these delivery startups are created by kids in their 20's who can only think in terms of getting pizza and sweets delivered.

Here's a real issue you can solve......

In our communities the local retailers such as butchers and greengrocers have had their businesses devastated by supermarkets.

You can change this. Be an ACTIVE conduit between customers and local retailers.

For example, call the butcher's customers each week and take their meat order, then deliver it. Same with greengrocers. Make the phone call personal and friendly "Hey there Sally, calling from SuperHeroDeliveries for Bob the Butcher, just confirming this weeks meat order."

The temptation of course for tech minded founders is to just build an interface and use alerts and reminders but the critical piece to the puzzle is the ongoing-forever weekly phone call to have a personal relationship and confirm the order.

The reason people buy from supermarkets is because they are in there anyway and its late and they are tired and the butcher probably closed at 6:00PM anyway so why not just do the easy thing and get the lower quality meat and veg from the supermarket.

Individual butchers aren't set up to run an active outreach to their customers, but your delivery service could.

So stop being obsessed with delivering things that 20 year olds want (i.e. takeaway food) and think about what both the retailer and adults people want delivered. Solve a real and deep community issue that is turning retail into a supermarket monoculture. Reconnect people back to their community retailers.

[calbear81]

There's no reason an instacart or doordash couldn't become the backbone for this type of service. They just need to allow local merchants to add their store/products and when users order, one of their drivers get a pickup and dropoff alert. The local merchant should promote the home delivery option via some signs they can print out and put in their store.

[hoodoof]

The really important point here is not just delivering, but actively reaching out on the phone at an appointed time to take that order.

[MalcolmDiggs]

If you have such a problem with these business models, why not start a company of your own that addresses these issues to your satisfaction?

[jmaj]

I've talked about this with Farmer Markets, one of the problem I found was monetization. They all love the idea but when I talk about money they back out.