The growth of downtown high-rise living has begun to reveal that home delivery of groceries may be more than a mere solution looking for a problem. Such a to-your-door Toronto start up is Urbery (cute name) which is said to be run by Mudit Rawat, a graduate of the Schulich School of Business. Urbery will shop at any local grocery store — Loblaws, Sobey’s, Longo’s or, one supposes, Summerhill Market — and deliver it within three hours. Dreamy if you need such things but don’t start calling because things are not quite in place yet. The company is searching for people who are mad about shopping to provide a level of service that might build a moneyed clientele. Delivery fee is based on the order size and can run from $9.99 for an order between $0 – $34.99 all the way down to $0 for orders over $99.99. In New York the established service Instacart has a reputation for service such as texting a customer to see if she wants the Expresso beans ground or not. That’s what you call service and it is not easy to achieve. Urbery’s online catalogue is said to offer over 3,000 products but we’re not sure how that works since they are shopping at somebody else’s store. The Wall Street Journal story linked below written by Anna Kadet is very entertaining and has a lot of detailed information like prices and things that can go wrong. She says AmazonFresh is terrifying. It has 500,000 items to choose from or be speechless over. Delivery is frequently in the $4 to $6 range. Kadet makes an amusing note that her Whole Foods delivery did not cost her the locally-whispered Whole Cheque but in fact was quite reasonable. Good luck. Wall Street Journal Urbery
