Internet grocery shopping is booming. If only it were profitable
IT IS vast, with more than 16 kilometres (10 miles) of conveyor belts and a futuristic control centre. It is also eerily sentient, in the way that highly automated plants tend to be, with thousands of little baskets zooming about. At this distribution centre, the largest of its sort in the world, Ocado fills baskets with about a million items of food and other perishable goods each day, loads them onto vans and sends them to homes across England.
Overshadowing the enormous warehouse, which sells about as much as 25 supermarkets would, are questions over the future of internet grocery shopping. The issue has been brought to the fore by Ocado’s plans to list its shares at a price that would putatively value the firm at about GBP1 billion ($1.52 billion). …
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