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Google wants to take a bite out of your apples (NOT your gadgets)

Fresh food deliveries: like Webvan, only with funds

Google is hoping to wean Silicon Valley man-children off junk food diets with fresh-food deliveries by its Google Express operation.

Google Express was announced in 2013 in opposition to Amazon and eBay's grocery deliver services. It's potentially a nice earner for Mountain View because it offers the chance to clip the coupon twice, charging advertisers on the way in, and snipping customers for purchases under $15 on the way out.

Bloomberg says the Chocolate Factory has already signed up the Whole Foods Market and Costco to create yet another “like Uber, only for replacing your mother” service.

Explaining its idea, Google says it's “in our incentive, as well as the merchant’s incentive, for us to help customers get the full store delivered to them” (don't blame The Register for the mangled language).

Mountain View also wants to out-Amazon Amazon, using the search-select-buy-deliver model to “lure more traffic to its Websites” the Bloomberg report says.

Of course, unlike the eternal procession of flopped delivery businesses in the 1997-2001 dotcom boom-and-bust, Google has enough cash to persist with such a venture until the heat death of the universe - or until it forgets the service, lets it languish in limbo for a few years, and abandons it in a periodic spring-clean.

Google Express's boss Brian Elliott also said fresh food delivery from partners to punters means the Chocolate Factory doesn't have to run its own warehouses for the operation.

At least, that's what we think he means in this explanation cited by Bloomberg:

“The fresh-food trial, including fruits and vegetables, is part of a move away from making deliveries from warehouses, which can add complexity and requires refrigeration”.

(Someone will need to have refrigeration, surely, or Google's fresh food deliveries will add a new meaning to the term 'grey goo'.)

Of course, Google wanting to run deliveries without running warehouses has nothing at all to do with Google Express Oompa-Loompas deciding to join hands with the Teamster's Union in the face of low wages, poor conditions, and a lack of benefits. ®

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