Trends
In case you were not convinced of the boom in food delivery services, take look at the chart below taken from Google Trends which shows the growth in usage of the search term 'delivery' by Austinites in the food and drink category: |
| Usage of Google Search Term 'Delivery' in Austin |
Favor
Headquarters: Austin, TX
Web Site: https://favordelivery.com/city/austin
Austin Delivery Area: https://favordelivery.com/map/austin
Overview
Favor is service that will deliver almost anything to you (for a fee). This can range from picking something up at the store to picking up a prescription thru doing your full grocery shop. Favor does not have any specific affiliations with restaurants or grocery stores and appears to be trying to stay generic on purpose to widen their utility.Ordering
You cannot order from from Favor with your web browser, you can only order from the mobile App. This may be a problem for folks not used to using their cell phone for everything such as the elderly. Still in it's relative infancy, the delivery area for Favor covers a large piece of central and North Austin but is not yet comprehensive. Austin Delivery Area MapWhen you download and startup the Favor App you are asked to enter your address and credit card. When you place your order, the first thing you do is select the restaurant/store you want to order from. We ordered food from Thai Fresh. The Favor App had very few items from the Thai Fresh menu so we ended up finding the items on the Thai Fresh web site and entering them manually. When entering items manually, be as descriptive as you can so that the runner is able to order the right items for you. Other restaurants are better represented on the Favor App and many of the Austin staples have full menus to select from.
I text messaged the runner from the Favor App to ask if we should call the restaurant to order the food or if he would so that. He said they normally do it but you could do it yourself if you wanted to. My advice is to let them order as they know when they are going to get there. If you order and they get there thirty minutes later, your food is going to get cold.
Delivery
It took fifty minutes from downloading the Favor App to receiving the food which was OK with us but not lighting fast. On their web site, Favor advertise that deliveries typically take up to 35 minutes but it is dependent on the establishment they are picking up from which makes sense. The Favor App provides up to date status of your order including when the runner accepts the order, when they are at the store, when they have the items and finally when they are at your place. Based on the status updates, the runner spent 30 minutes of the 50 minutes at the restaurant which highlights the fact that the delivery time has a big dependency on the store/restaurant.Once the runner left the store the Favor App let me know that I could pay. It suggested the tip at 20% and included details of the fees (see below). The runner came right up to our condo door which was great, he handed over the food and was off. There was no awkward fumbling for money or tips which beats your average pizza delivery.
Pricing
In Austin, each favor/trip costs $5 plus 5% of the item cost. In addition to that you also tip the runner based on the cost of the items you have purchased. They do not mark up the price of the items you are buying as some other services do. The entire payment transaction is handled within the Favor App and charged to your credit card, no cash changes hands between you and the runner. The charges showed on my credit card as 'FAVORDELIVERY COM'.Our Favor bill worked out as follows:
Cost of Items : $ 26.53
Tip for Runner (20%) : $ 5.25
Processing Fee ( 5%) : $ 1.33
Delivery Fee (fixed) : $ 5.00
Total Cost : $ 38.11
Top 10 Favored Merchants in Austin (According to KXAN Favor tracks Austin’s most popular delivery foods):
- Torchy’s Tacos
- Whataburger
- P. Terry’s
- Raising Cane’s
- Kerbey Lane
Instacart
Founded: July 1st 2012Headquarters: San Francisco, CA
Web Site: https://www.instacart.com
Austin Delivery Area: https://www.instacart.com/locations/austin
Overview
Instacart is grocery focused delivery service that will shop for your groceries and deliver them to your front door. In our zip code, Instacart offers services at Costco, Whole Foods, HEB, Central Market, Royal Blue Grocery, Greenling, Petco and Tomlinsons. At our local Whole Foods, Instacart has a large refrigerator outside the front door whey they store bagged items ready to be delivered. No other delivery services have such a direct tie in with Whole Foods. This gives the appearance of a more seamless interface between the delivery service and the grocery store.Ordering
Unlike with Favor, you can order from Instacart's web site as well as their mobile App. Having the ability to see your grocery items on the big screen make things come to life. After your initial account setup where you provide address and credit card information, you are first prompted to select the store you want to shop from. The list of stores is dependent on your zip code. After selecting the store, you are provided with available delivery (and pickup if you prefer) times. It also indicates if prices for the store you have selected are the same as the ones in the actual store (see pricing below).After that, you go about selecting the items you want and adding them to your cart. In my experience, they had all the items I wanted listed in the site, you can also add an item that is not listed and they will get that for you also (providing it exists). You can add items to your favorites, create your own shopping lists and also select from items you have purchased before. You can select items from virtual isles or just type the item name in the search at the top of the screen. I find it much easier to just type the name of the item. When you search in this fashion it will also give you the option to see the item at the other supported stores so you can comparison shop.
Overall the ordering user interface for Instacart is uncluttered, clear and easy to navigate.
Packing & Delivery
You initiate the checkout process from the shopping cart icon. Instacart will tell you if you have reached the $35 limit for cheaper delivery charge which is helpful. After clicking checkout, you select the delivery address, decide whether you want delivery or pickup and then select your preferred time slot. After that you will be asked to provide payment information and select a tip percentage. You will also be presented with a confirmation of the delivery time and the delivery fee. Finally, you are asked to pick some substitutes in case your items are not available, you can also choose not to select a substitute (banana peppers don't make a great backup for bananas).After final confirmation the shopping and delivery process is underway. Instacart keeps you up to date with the progress of your order throughout the process. There is a really nice feature where you can follow the delivery driver on a map as they make their way to your house. This gives you time to prepare for their arrival.
If a particular item is not available at the time of shopping, your shopper will text you and you can agree on a replacement or just forget that item. We have placed four orders so far and faced no significant issues. You are sacrificing the choice of which specific avocado or banana to pick but you gain incredible convenience.
Pricing
A couple of things to watch out for with Instacart. Unlike Whole Foods where you pay in-store prices for items, at Costco Instacart prices the items differently (supposedly to account for membership fees etc.). According to Instacart this adds up to 15% on top of the in-store prices. If you add in delivery fee and tip, this pricing scheme can add a significant amount to your bill and the value becomes questionable. It really does not feel right to pay more for the goods and to pay the fees and it has stopped me from using the service for Costco. I have read that Instacart's long term goal is for all prices to match in-store prices which they can only achieve by establishing Whole Foods type partnerships.There is a $10 minimum order and the delivery fee is reduced to $3.99 (for 2 hour or scheduled deliveries) if you order more than $35 worth of goods. Let's face it, this is not tough to do at the likes of Costco and Whole Foods. This fee goes up if you request one hour delivery.
You can also opt for Instacart Express. With Instacart Express, you get free delivery on 2 hour & scheduled grocery deliveries over $35. This membership does not give you faster delivery or earlier time slots than other customers. Instacart Express costs $99/year.
There is also a concept of 'Busy' pricing where an additional delivery fee is added at peak hours (similar to surge pricing on Uber). We have not encountered this yet.
As with favor, all the financial aspects are handled through the App and no cash changes hands. The charges showed on my credit card as 'INSTACART'.
Our first bill worked out as follows:
Cost of Items: $72.49
Delivery Fee : $ 3.99
Tip : $11.48
Total : $87.96
When dealing with a store where Instacart offers 'same as in store pricing', Instacart is a much better option than Favor for your grocery shopping needs. In our experience we found we did not spend anymore than we would have buying in store. How can that be? We found we only bought what we really needed using Instacart whereas in the store we tend to add things to the basket that we really do not need (usually things that are bad for us). This is not borne out in the statistics, however, as according to a pymts.com article Instacart’s Retail Partnerships Delivering:
Whole Foods executives have reported that the basket sizes of on-line shoppers are 2.5 times higher than the metal ones.The Instacart partnership seems to be working for Whole Foods. In an earnings call earlier this year, Whole Foods Co-CEO John Mackey said:
"With on-line delivery sales as high as 5 percent of total sales in some of our stores, we are very excited about the future potential as we expand our reach to more markets, provide richer content highlighting our quality standard and broaden our product offering."
Amazon Prime Now
Founded: July 5th 1994 (Restaurant Delivery Started in Austin in December 2015)Headquarters: Seattle, WA
Web Site: https://www.amazon.com/primenow
Austin Delivery Area: Go to the Prime Now Site and enter your zip code
Ordering
For the purposes of this post I will describe my experience ordering from the new Prime Now restaurant delivery service. For restaurant delivery, Amazon has partnered up with local restaurants so you can only select food from the restaurants they have partnered with. They do guarantee one hour delivery for their restaurant deliveries and two hours for other deliveries. At time of writing, you can order from about thirty restaurants in my ZIP code (78704).As with Favor, you have to order through the Mobile App. You are presented with a list of categories (American, Indian, Thai etc.) or you can scroll through a full list. Once you select a restaurant ordering menu items is pretty straight forward. As you add items, the usual Amazon cart symbol in the top right updates with the number of items ordered.
Checkout and Delivery
 |
| Screen Shot from App |
Pricing
When we ordered, Amazon was offering a 'limited time free delivery'. According to a Tech Crunch Article Amazon Prime Now is going to charge a fee to each restaurant and may not charge a delivery fee as long as you order $20 worth of food. So, it seems that for right now delivery is free but I am not convinced it will stay that way and of course you will still need to pay the $99/year for Amazon Prime Membership. If you are like me and have Amazon Prime anyway this could be a great deal. Amazon included a suggested tip which was 20% but you can change that if you want. The price of the restaurant items does not seem to be marked up by Amazon Prime Now. One thing to note for Amazon Prime Now is that you have to pay Tax, this is not the case for Favor or Instacart.Our first Amazon Prime Now bill worked out as follows:
Cost of Items: $25.27
Delivery Fee : $ 0.00
Tax : $ 2.09
Tip : $ 5.00
Total : $32.36
All in all, we had a great experience with Amazon Prime Now.
Some other delivery services operating in Downtown Austin:
- https://postmates.com Goal: Deliver any product from the city in under an hour.
- https://www.burpy.com Goal: Grocery Delivery Service
- https://www.grubhub.com Goal: Order Food Directly from Restaurants
- http://www.brewdrop.com Goal: Eliminate the Beer Run
Conclusion
Delivery services are expanding across the nation as American's search for ways to make their lives even more convenient. In my opinion these are fantastic services that should be used surgically and only when they give you back valuable time (e.g. time with your kids, time to go out and see a concert). It is getting far to easy to sit on your couch and have the world come to you. In addition to that, the costs do add up, $5 here for a Favor and $4 there for Instacart will soon add up to $500 or more over the course of a year.Having said that, I have an elderly mother in the United Kingdom who has her groceries delivered every week and it is one of the main reasons she is able to stay in her own home. If there was a service like Favor in her part of the UK as well, it would make a huge difference to her way of life and keep her out of the retirement home longer.
We will be using Instacart, PrimeNow and Favor again but only when we really need to (or if it is raining outside, or when we are tired, or when there is a game on, or when ...)
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