The end of 10-minute delivery

Have we finally seen the end of quick grocery, popularly known as 10-minute-delivery in India?

Zepto, a company started by 2 teenagers, raised tens of millions of dollars on the promise that Indians would pay extra for groceries delivered within 10 minutes. I don’t know what made them believe that they can sell this novel idea, but some big VCs found it promising and backed it.

It was the good old days of the Venture Capital industry when money was cheap and no idea seemed ridiculous. VCs believed that there were no stupid questions, and founders knew no answers were stupid enough not to get funded. All one needed was the right background, networking skills, and a lot of luck.

I wonder if a startup promising 10 minute delivery would even raise a dime in 2023?

Zepto, the original trailblazer, still promises 10-minute-delivery on its website, although I don’t know how many of its users use it because they need their “coke” in 10 minutes. I know even cokeheads can wait for more than 10 minutes 😎.

But Zepto used the money wisely by building robust cold supply chain and a network of dark stores. Its founders might be young, but they are wise beyond their years. They know they don’t have to use the money for the story they sold. They raised capital under the guise of 10-minute-delivery because they needed to differentiate in a market full of “slow” grocery delivery startups. And now they have become a regular grocery delivery service, albeit a good one.

I haven’t used their service, but I know several food D2C founders want to onboard Zepto as their delivery partner. The kids must be doing some good work 👏👏.

But once Zepto raised capital under this imaginative facade, the other food and delivery startups felt left out. Everyone knew burning capital was their birthright, and 10-minute-delivery seemed a good bandwagon to ride. Thus, we had Zomato, Swiggy, Grofers or Blinkit, and even Ola saying they wanted to feed India within 10 minutes. We suddenly became a country full of impatient Neanderthals who couldn’t even wait a few hours for our tomatoes 🤤.

Eventually, everyone realized this was both stupid and unrealistic. You can’t deliver food or grocery or even medicine within 10 minutes in this crowded and chaotic country, no matter how many how many people you employ and how many dark stores you open. You can do it on a small scale in some neighbourhood, but this model is just not scalable. And startups are at their core scalable businesses.

Hence, slowly everyone dropped this idea and went back to slow or quick delivery. With Zomato officially pulling out of it, we’ve thankfully seen end of this madness. Now all of us can go back to ordering groceries in 30 or 90 minutes or whatever time these companies are promising.

So good bye 10-minute-grocery. You won’t be missed because you were never needed. It just took VCs a few hundred millions to realize this.

During the COVID-19 pandemic, the demographics of cities shifted. As stay-at-home orders, remote work and bubbling reduced social interaction, and restaurants, venues and arts destinations shut down temporarily, people considered leaving big cities.

And as public health restrictions were lifted, the cost of living increased. Smaller urban centres saw this moment as an opportunity to capitalize on the desire for a higher quality of life and a more “authentic” existence. Smaller and mid-sized cities in North America invested in strategies to attract new residents.

In this episode of The Conversation Weekly podcast, we spoke with two urban theorists about why people were leaving larger cities for smaller ones, how authenticity was marketed using social media influencers, and why smaller and mid-sized cities are underrated.

Avi Friedman is a professor of architecture at McGill University in Montréal, Canada who has looked at demographic trends in small and mid-sized cities in Canada. He explains that smaller cities need to recruit new residents in order to collect taxes.

“It all has to boil down to economics,” Friedman explains. “They need taxpayers — it is a major issue in making the city work. When there is a negative migration and people moving away, it usually puts at risk the funds of these communities, meaning that there is no sources of income.”

David A. Banks is a lecturer in the Department of Geography and Planning at the University at Albany, State University of New York, United States, and the author of The City Authentic, which will be published in April. He describes authenticity as essential to small cities’ survival, as they apply it to themselves to attract new residents looking for an escape from larger cities.

The city authentic, Banks describes “encourages people to think of the city as a place to be authentically you and to get away from these pre-packaged, commodified notions of how to live your life.”

It’s meant to appeal to younger residents, who may want to relocate for a better quality of life, and maybe own property and start a family, further rooting in the community.

“People who live in small towns know their neighbours. They meet either in community clubs and in a church. It is a different type of relations that create another aspect of what it means to live in nice places,” says Friedman.

But there’s a downside to this. When smaller cities successfully recruit new residents, it can have a negative impact on the older ones. Banks says that “what it did do is make everything unaffordable, literally like triple or quadruple digit percentage increases” in the cost of living.

But it appears the trend of leaving large cities to move to smaller ones is reversing. For people to stay, smaller cities need to invest more in amenities and infrastructure to support the population growth.