Chop Chop! Sainsbury’s has launched a brainwave of a money-spinner that doesn’t involve buying up 1980s high street brands. It’s going to charge people £4.99 to deliver groceries inside an hour. So if you absolutely must have your top-up shop in your hands before the hour is up, you can just reach for a new plastic fiver and spend it on a person on a bike who will deliver it to your door, red-faced, but thrilled he made it on time.
This is a ground-breaking moment. Not only is it the first time a British supermarket has offered one-hour delivery on anything, it’s also the first time anyone has attempted to do it using a bicycle. Beat that Amazon! It’s a charming move by Sainsbury’s, clearly intended to juxtapose the frenetic pace of modern grocery with that kid on a Hovis bike. Either that or CEO Mike Coupe’s passion for cycling has spilled over into the boardroom.
But none of that really matters anyway. Is the app any good?
Don’t get too carried away for now. Sainsbury’s has form when it comes to long trials of mobile apps. Its Scan and Go shopping app has been on trial longer than Oscar Pistorius. But it looks pretty smart. You can order 20 items from Sainsbury’s to be delivered inside sixty minutes, making your selection from over 5,000 skus including meat and fish, dairy, alcohol, fruit and veg and more. Then you metaphorically fire your starting pistol and wait for a supermarket version of squeaky-clean champion cyclist Bradley Wiggins to appear with the food.
Sainsbury’s says the technology is perfect for buying goods in an emergency. The concept of emergency groceries is novel – “the only way we are going to get out of this emergency is to have a mixed basket of groceries inside this house in the next 60 minutes, fire up the app!” – but Sainsbury’s has been pleased with the results from trials.
“In Wandsworth, customers are using the new one-hour delivery service to buy forgotten items, or emergency goods when they cannot leave their home or have invited guests on the spur of the moment,” said Sainsbury’s director of digital and technology Jon Rudoe. And there is nothing funny about the moment you invite guests on the spur of the moment then freeze in a panic when you realise you’ve run out of pesto.
And there are more serious applications I suppose, like if you desperately need an alternative because your kids are having a few friends over and it turns out one of the little angels is allergic to gluten, or dairy, or peanuts.
Plus, the app has some nice touches. You can browse recipes and it will send you the ingredients. And it does cost £4.99 for an order, which seems high when a pizza costs nothing, but compared to the cost and hassle of driving into town for a bag of groceries, for some it will be totally worth it. And Sainsbury’s has recruited a massive team of 40 cyclists and grocery pickers – all of them regular employees as opposed to gig economy slaves – because it is confident there is demand for the service.
So is Sainsbury’s committed to the idea? Or is it just a gimmick to steal some headlines and continue its attempt to reposition Sainsbury’s as a modern multi-channel retailer, the British Amazon, an agile thing that can easily compete with the likes of Deliveroo and Uber when it comes to rapidly racing groceries to hungry punters?
The answer to that will be in the roll-out. Following the trials in Wandsworth, the service is now available in Streatham and Richmond in London, and somewhere called Brookwood in Surrey. Will the rest of us be lucky enough to be afforded the same privilege? If not, we shouldn’t worry too much. There will be another online start-up promising the same thing along soon. Inside the hour, probably.
No comments yet