Alert, your next superurgent delivery is in danger

In the heat of the pandemic and the rise of startups, companies specialized in sending the purchase home in record time have burst in.

Thomas Osborne
Thomas Osborne
30 January 2023 Monday 11:22
14 Reads
Alert, your next superurgent delivery is in danger

In the heat of the pandemic and the rise of startups, companies specialized in sending the purchase home in record time have burst in. However, the model of placing an order online in a dark store -a store that operates closed to the public- and that the purchased products arrive in 10 minutes "is staggering", warns the business school professor and popularizer Pablo Foncillas.

One of the most obvious symptoms is the concentration of platforms in the sector, which recently materialized with the acquisition of Gorillas by its Turkish competitor Getir. According to the New York Times, German startup Gorillas was losing around $1.5 per dollar of revenue. A “nosedive” fall that led it to close several markets.

Foncillas asks if this business model has arrived "too soon" or if it has done so at the right time, but "it has gone too far with its promise of delivery times". In this sense, he wonders to what extent the market is prepared for dark stores with ultra-fast deliveries, which "have too high costs".

“This might only make sense for certain shopping carts, on very specific products, and in some neighborhoods in some cities. It is too concrete and particular a case to work on a large scale”, he explains.