Logistics employees who worked on the California service said this hub-and-spoke model ended up being inefficient and unreliable; one said that Amazon was “basically stapling a $10 or $20 bill to every order.” The Fresh team also tracked a metric called “perfect deliveries”—when an order was promptly delivered and included every item. They found they were hitting that target less than 70 percent of the time. Grocery industry veterans belittled the effort from afar. “Amazon Fresh is their Waterloo,” John Mackey told me during our chat in 2014. “What’s the one thing people want? Convenience. You
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