Instacart Brings Same-Day Grocery Delivery Service to Washington, DC
Customers Can Order From Harris Teeter Initially; Other Stores to Be Added in Coming Weeks
WASHINGTON, DC--(Marketwired - Feb 11, 2014) - Instacart (www.Instacart.com), the only service that can deliver groceries from multiple local stores within an hour, announced today that it has expanded to the Washington, DC metro area. Beginning today, items from Harris Teeter can be ordered and delivered by an Instacart Personal Shopper. Additional stores will be added in the coming weeks, allowing customers to combine items from multiple stores into one order and have them delivered in as little as one hour.
Customers can open an account at www.Instacart.com, and get free delivery on their first order of $35 or more. They can order virtually any item carried in their neighborhood Harris Teeter stores.
Originally launched in San Francisco and later expanded to Chicago and Boston, Instacart has disrupted the traditional grocery delivery space with its crowdsourced labor force dubbed "Personal Shoppers" who shop for and deliver grocery orders using their own vehicles in as little as one hour. This eliminates the need for costly infrastructure such as warehouses, trucks and full-time drivers. Instacart is not affiliated with the stores; its model is to connect customers with Personal Shoppers who shop on their behalf.
How it works:
Customers go online to www.Instacart.com, select their city/store, and add items to a virtual cart, then choose a delivery window (within one hour, within two hours, or some scheduled time in the future) and check out.
An Instacart Personal Shopper accepts the order on his/her smartphone, uses the Instacart Shopper app to guide them through shopping, and then delivers the order to the customer in the designated delivery timeframe.
The vast majority of Instacart customers select two-hour delivery for a charge of just $3.99. One-hour delivery is also available, for a charge of $14.99. The minimum order size is $10. For other FAQs, visit https://www.instacart.com/store#faq.
In June, Instacart raised $8.5M in Series A funding and announced its intention to expand to 10 additional major cities by the end of 2014. Chicago, Boston and Washington, DC are three of those ten cities. Instacart has experienced double-digit, month-over-month growth since launching in San Francisco, Chicago and Boston.
Instacart founder and CEO Apoorva Mehta said the company chose Washington, DC as its fourth city due to its high concentration of tech-savvy urban dwellers, the high percentage of residents without cars and the city's weather. DC is also a place where people work long hours but want to eat healthy, making it a great fit for a home delivery grocery service. "The combination of tough weather conditions, residents working long hours without access to cars, and a desire to eat healthy made DC a perfect match for our convenient online grocery delivery service," said Mehta. "We're really excited to bring Instacart to DC and give folks a healthy, easy way to get great food delivered right to their doorstep."
Instacart serves the following neighborhoods in the DC metro area:
Logan Circle, Capitol Hill, Southeast, The Mall, Logan Circle, Farragut Square, Georgetown / Glover Park, Woodley & Cleveland Parks, Adams Morgan (AdMo), Columbia Heights, Petworth, Tenleytown/AU, Southwest, DuPont Circle, Foggy Bottom, Ballston, Pentagon/Crystal City, Arlington, and Rosslyn.
For a full map of Instacart's current Washington-area coverage, visit https://www.instacart.com/locations/
About Instacart
Instacart is the only service that can deliver groceries from multiple local stores within an hour, and is often less expensive for consumers than a personal, time-consuming trip to the grocery store. Customers in San Francisco, Boston, Chicago, and Washington, DC can choose from over 270,000 items from local grocery stores and large chains like Safeway, Whole Foods, Shaw's and Costco. Instacart is disrupting the traditional grocery delivery business with its approach, which utilizes a crowdsourced model of Personal Shoppers who use their own cars and smartphones to shop and deliver groceries to customers. This model eliminates the need for costly infrastructure such as warehouses, trucks and full-time drivers. Learn more at www.Instacart.com.
