> 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...