> Because the actual environmental harm of normal customer pick up is pretty large - its very inefficient to have hundreds of people converge on one location, rather then a single person or (robot) deliver many orders to the same hundreds of people.

A few months ago, this was the reasoning that tipped me into looking into grocery delivery options.

Unfortunately, I'm not really interested in services using instacart/doordash/etc., but they've been driving the in-house delivery services out of the market. Of the ~5 grocery services here, 2 were always instacart/doordash, the formerly 2 best options abandoned their in-house services within the past year, and the remaining option is expensive enough that I'm not really motivated away from just driving over to the closest store myself. (The store with delivery is notably further away.)

I guess maybe that's just the cost of delivery outside of the gig model, and the dis-efficiencies of everyone driving to the store are externalized away...

Not the original commenter, but I share the same sentiment.

The harm done is that there is less human interaction outside one's bubble. Before deliver-anything-at-home you were forced to be in environments where you'd interact with people you'd normally not see.

At some level you're also building a connection if you're interacting with the same service employee or bump into a neighbor.

Strong communities is a massive boost to public health. It reduces loneliness and prevents all kinds of deceases (heart stuff, dementia, etc). It also builds a safety net so people don't have to rely so much on official healthcare.

Now obviously just some food delivery is not destroying community by itself. There's probably worse offenders out there. However, society becomes more and more parallel and robots do contribute to it. Unfortunately it's not something that's discussed a lot.

This isn't true. The grocery distribution model is incredibly efficient in terms of transportation cost even if you drive there.

A delivery usually only transports a limited number of items and has to come from a far away hub. With grocery stores, the hub is less than 2km away and you usually buy more than half a shopping cart of goods.

these robots can take only one order at a time (at least here in Prague) since they don't have multiple separated compartments and it takes ages to deliver one order (company claims 14 minutes in 1-2km zone, but I have my doubts about their data, I assume at best they mean delivery time since pick up in restaurant to customer building), so it's much more efficient for people to walk that 1-2km or take public transport to pick up their food

I remember they proudly published their THREE robots delivered successfully 130 orders over 4 months period since trial started in December 2025, even over one month it would be less than two orders per day per robot, over 4 months the number is a bad joke, not even one order or day.

https://www.lupa.cz/aktuality/autonomnich-rozvazkovych-robot...

Though now they are planning sweeping robots which seems like much better use of robots doing something useful beneficial to everyone, not only to bunch of lazy hipsters.