I long for the day when all shopping can be done online and everything is delivered to my door, but that’s because I’m one of the laziest people I have ever met.

Not everyone is on the same wavelength, because big overseas supermarket chains still can’t crack the online grocery shopping market.

The likes of Amazon, Walmart, and Target, as well as traditional grocers like Safeway, are all giving it a bash, investing heavily in ordering and delivery capabilities to try and make people change their shopping habits.

There is, according to QZ, one big thing standing in the way of their success – people prefer to handpick items themselves:

That survey data comes from Morgan Stanley. More on the struggle to make customers switch:

Getting people to feel comfortable with having their groceries selected for them is an uphill battle, especially with produce. People can have very particular preferences when buying their fruits and vegetables. For example, maybe they like their bananas a little green, but their avocados ripe and ready to eat.

Gotta get that avo just right, before we smash it on toast and blow all of our money instead of investing in property.

Instacart, a San Francisco-based startup that has raised more than $700 million to make grocery delivery mainstream, are well aware of this problem:

A 2014 training video by Instacart gave detailed instructions to hired shoppers on how to select produce. “Please make sure there are no bruises, no cuts, no mold [sic], it’s not too soft, not too hard, just perfectly ripe,” the instructor said, before giving even more specific rules for bananas. (“The perfect banana is yellow with green at the tips. For larger quantities pick ones that are less ripe. If the customer orders 15 bananas, they’re going to need more time to eat them.”)

Just imagine the food wastage that goes on behind closed doors to make that all work.

One more stat, before we move on with our day – the share of people who say they tried and didn’t like ordering groceries online increased to 27% in 2017, from 17% the year before.

Sounds like an uphill battle over in the US.

[source:qz]