My thoughts on quick commerce, and the entrepreneurship of apathy

First essay! Don't lose heart, I do have nice things to say about the world. It's just much easier to whine than to thoughtfully appraise an album or something.

I haven't quite seen the post-COVID world. About as soon as the pandemic ended I was in Pilani, full of other people who also haven't lived in the outside world post-COVID. Pilani operates on a pretty unique internal logic, or lack thereof. I suppose it doesn't mean much, because I don't think most people even out in Pilani are particularly bothered by how abnormal everything has been since the pandemic ended. Not experiencing the post-COVID world isn't a credential then, just an explanation.

The sight that really summarises the insanity I see in post-COVID India was that of quick-commerce electric scooters on footpaths absolutely not suitable for pedestrian use. Quick commerce is my great personal bogeyman. It is a massive step in engineering a perfectly apathetic society. It's such a massive step that it sometimes makes feel that I should inherit the apathy of my society.

Non-existent standards becoming more non-existent

I never really expected our outdoors to get better, and I somehow expect it even less. The disparity between Indian outdoors and indoors is this bizarre fact of life out here. If the general standards of Indian outdoors were to be translated to interior quality, it translates roughly to the insides of a general class train. Assuming that it's only India-A (the top 100 million or so Indians) reading this, I suppose your home looks a whole lot better than that. We don't necessarily love staying at home, we hate going out.

Ours is not the situation which needed Silicon Valley idealism (more tech = more good). In fact, this article was initially for me to whine about Digital India, but there is a some benefit I need to extract from it first. We just need a somewhat functioning government, which my city in particular does not have. "More tech" lead us to the most cynical solution — if the outdoors suck, just don't go out. The Indian zeitgeist has become irreversibly divorced from walkable neighbourhoods and jazz like that. Our neighbourhoods are barely safe enough to drive in.

Bad infra isn't even the worst thing

If your society is profoundly low-trust, just rely on trustless transactions. What happens when people you know stay at home and hire people you don't know to buy their groceries? You have a neighbourhood of absolute strangers, devoid of community. You end up with a street with not a single person who can be held accountable tomorrow, because they don't live here — they can choose to never show their face again. The techbro solution to an already unsafe society made it even more unsafe.

Outside unsafe -> we all find a way to stay at home -> outside even more unsafe

We somehow fumbled the women's-safety aspect more than I'd thought possible and created the worst feedback loop. It's easy for me (a dude) to take the principled position and head out for a loaf of bread at 10pm, but well, yeah.

But it's cheaper!

Won't be for long. Practically speaking, the primary solution quick commerce offers is simply that it's cheaper, and often by huge margins and on things that conventional grocers would simply never discount you on. In fact, that's the entire problem. I wouldn't really care if this stuff was faithfully priced. But it isn't. It's entirely a matter of who can afford losses for longer — a quick-commerce platform or the local grocer? For one it's a matter of burning through investor cash that was meant to be burnt through, for the other it's not being able to support your family. Some call this disruptive innovation, while the more traditional of us call it monopolistic competition or predatory pricing. We all intuitively know that we aren't "acquired customers" simply because we found a better deal on a particular app. You'd be right, because customer acquisition is not actually the point — the point is to force your competition (i.e. brick & mortar grocery stores) out of the market. It's less customer acquisition and more war of attrition.

I don't think there'd be anything too bothersome about quick commerce companies charging you exactly as much today as they plan to 5 years down the line. You'd just have an altern... we know it doesn't work like that. This is a business that needs an unfathomable scale to make sense. The only way really to ensure that it's profitable tomorrow is to make sure your competitors exit the market today, at any cost. You need a gazillion transactions every hour, because you can really only make a buck off of each (at least as long as your fellow quick-commerce competitors haven't left the market). If it was faithfully priced today, you'd just ask your son to make a run to the kirana store.

Doesn't matter what you call it, there will come a day when the local grocer shuts down, the investor money runs dry, and the prices are as much as they used to be — we all just got robbed blind. We sold our family-run stores for roc.. to become gig workers.

So what do we do? Hell if I know. I'm just a dude who's a little fixated on this matter (and my love for going outside), didn't say I had any answers.