How long until Ocado go bust?

When Ocado first came out in the UK they were great. You could book your the delivery time down to the hour, they’d actually have what you ordered in stock and their software was really easy to use. So I used them a few times but eventually decided I wasn’t so lazy that I wanted to spend a fiver for the privilege of doing my grocery shopping on my ass. Actually I think I ran out of free delivery vouchers.

Since then they bombard me with offers trying to entice me back. From these mails you get a rough idea what they need their average customer to spend per week to stay profitable. If I recall correctly it was initially spend £50 and get free delivery (normally £5). This was close enough to my typical spend (£20-£40 depending on how hungry I am when I shop) to get me to spend above £50. This gradually rose over time until the offer I received today:

			For deliveries by 11/03/2006 Dear Mr Barr, March is already here, the year is flying by and we don’t want you to spend more time than necessary doing your weekly shopping. Place an order from the comfort of your favourite chair and we’ll give you a special gift and a little more time to do something else! Simply place an order over £85 for delivery between Monday 6th and Saturday 11th March and we’ll add a free bottle of wine to your order. We look forward to seeing you next week at www.ocado.com. Neil Jewsbury On behalf of the Ocado Team.

Spend £85 and get a free nondescript bottle of wine? No free delivery any more, I guess that was too expensive. Clearly I’m no longer in their target market, who spends £85 a week on groceries? I know I could easily unsubscribe but I do find how their offers are getting less and less enticing when they’re trying to get me to spend more money very funny.

Update: This week’s offer is spend £90 and get two bottles of wine! I thought when someone was getting desperate the offer was supposed to get better.

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This entry was posted on Thursday, March 2nd, 2006 at 10:24 pm and is filed under Ramblings, Business. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.