Thatās an interesting theory, but I think thereās quite a lot of evidence that it is not likely to happen in the foreseeable future.
Self-service stores were an evolution of the traditional person-behind-a-counter stores, and supermarkets were an evolution of small self-service stores. Each evolution brought with it dramatic improvements in efficiency, but the fundamentals havenāt changed: a shop has a collection of products and it needs to get those into customersā hands as efficiently as possible. The key to each evolution has been an opportunity for shops to shift more of the manual labour onto their customers. Most recently, self-service checkout has enabled shops to shift even more labour onto their customers.
Delivery might feel like the next logical step, and itās certainly convenient for a certain type of customer, however, itās reverting to where we were more than a century ago. Delivery is expensive and inefficient. A Sainsburyās customer who walks into their local Sainsburyās and then uses self-checkout to complete their purchase has a negligible marginal cost for Sainsburyās, so much so that we can probably consider each customer who comes through the door to be āfreeā.
Delivery has a marginal cost, every delivery order has a cost, and itās a substantial one: it shifts all of the labour back onto the shop! A customer places an order online and then some stressed order picker spends 10 minutes sprinting around the store grabbing the items before a stressed delivery driver spends 20 minutes on the actual delivery. The store has gone from the negligible marginal cost of a customer to 30 minutes per customer. Even if, with years of investment in robots and ai and any other fantastical idea, thereās a 75% improvement in the cost of delivery, thatās still orders of magnitude more than the cost of a customer just walking into the store.
The only way delivery can compete with in-store is if thereās a way to reduce the cost of delivering an order to nothing, however, even supermarkets at the cutting edge like Ocado are struggling to make it work (and have been struggling for decades). Recently the āinstant groceriesā boom in major cities has shown that this reality (delivery is expensive) is inescapable, even with small well-located mini-warehouses. Supermarkets succeed because of high volume and low marginal costs, they benefit from the efficiencies available at scale.
As a customer, I love delivery, but until we discover a way to deliver at no cost I donāt see how it can compete with customers buying in-store at no cost. Even with the promise of self-driving trucks and cars, thereās still a substantial cost associated with deploying and managing that technology. I am a regular customer of Amazon Fresh, and even that, a service by the gold standard for efficiency in delivery, is terribly inefficient: based on my own anecdata, it takes at least 15 minutes for an Amazon delivery driver to deliver my Amazon Fresh order (i.e: from the moment they leave the previous customer, to finishing my delivery, is at least 15 minutes).
Supermarkets are very close to maximally efficient within our current constraints (i.e: no ability to teleport). If you imagine youāre Amazon, and someone offered you the magical ability to become self-service (like a supermarket) youād jump at the chance, because if all you had to do was put products on a shelf, your customers would walk in and pick it up and carry it and pay for it and take it home without any work on your behalf, wow, what a miracle.
If I were a betting man, Iād bet in Sainsburyās favour and Iād bet against Ocado.