Amazon Fresh has just announced that, effective February 28, it will be raising the threshold for free grocery delivery. Orders under $50 will be charged a $9.95 fee. Orders between $50 and $100 will be charged a $6.95 fee. And orders between $100 and $150 will be charged a $3.95 fee. Orders above $150 will be free. Previously, the threshold for free delivery was $35.
This is likely an indication of two things. It speaks to our current tech headwinds (see "The Four Horsemen of the Tech Recession") and it speaks to the fact that grocery is unique. It requires a whole separate logistics chain, compared to all of the other things that Amazon will deliver to you. Food goes bad. It bruises. And it may require refrigeration.
This makes online grocery delivery more challenging and more costly.
Dan Frommer has just just released his latest Consumer Trends report (2023). If you'd like to download a free copy, you can do that over here. It is amazing to see how big of a deal Tik Tok has become. In Q3 2022, the average Android user spent 98 minutes per day in the app. That is a lot, and it's roughly 2x what Facebook and Instagram each saw (though if you combine these two apps, I guess they're pretty similar). Either way, this is where people's attention is now being spent. For those of us in real estate, the report also has some interesting slides on grocery stores. The key message here is that physical stores remain hugely important.
The year-over-year change in online grocery spending is now flat to a little negative:
No matter which generation you ask, more people prefer shopping for groceries in-store, versus online:
And even when people do shop for groceries "online", they still tend to pick them up from their local store or have that local store deliver it to them (so the store matters):
For the full report, click here.
Blair Welch, co-founder of Slate Asset Management, was recently on Institutional Real Estate's podcast talking about grocery-anchored real estate. In it, he talks about the role that this asset class plays in last-mile food logistics, why ecommerce might actually be strengthening its importance, and why it needs to be considered as being distinct from other kinds of retailing. This is a topic that we have covered a few times before on the blog and I think many of you might find it interesting. To have a listen, click here.