I think you're just lacking in a realization that being in the "wealthiest, most populous town in the richest county in the United States" does not guarantee you get to be the first to try new services. I don't know if living in that town means you also have any sort of intelligence, but if you didn't notice, this kind of service requires a lot of local overhead (trucks, delivery people, contracts with stores, etc). Obviously, Google is going to launch it on their home turf first.

Maybe if you move from the "richest county in the United States" to an area with more common folk, like Mountain View (sarcasm), you'll have better luck with trying products.

Yes. I wouldn't expect the richest county to be the target... it's probably not very dense because of large houses/yards, and everyone probably owns a car. I'd expect them to go with urban areas first, both because the higher density would make such a service more cost-effective to operate, and because car-free people are going to get the most use out of this, since there are lots more things that are hard to buy without a car.

Of course there is an urban advantage to services like this. In high density areas, the economics of the delivery service can make financial sense.

This isn't sour grapes, I probably wouldn't use the service anyways.

But consider this, the Bay Area (the premier delivery zone) has less than half the density of my town, which is on the edge of the principle tech corridor of the entire East Coast, which carries 70% of all the world's internet traffic, has more telecom and satellite companies than any place else on the planet, the national hub for data storage facilities, relatively low taxes, the highest educated and most affluent workforce in the U.S. and an astonishing number of high density business clusters.

If you consider the metro area I'm in (D.C.), the metro area is almost exactly like that of the entire Bay Area. Similar area, similar population density, centered on a major city with a similarly sized population. Both have extensive traffic issues, highly educated, affluent and mobile workforces, etc. Arguably has better transit infrastructure, logistics infrastructure and other supports. We also have far worse weather, making a service like this make far more sense.

But as we've seen time and again, the Bay Area desperately wants to be NYC (or rather, Manhattan) yet has characteristics no better than a #10 metro area and is only willing to take on the Bay Area and just one borough of NYC. San Francisco itself is just #20 in terms of density and only 1/10 the population of NYC.

SV needs to start acting like there's more to the U.S. than the Bay Area and Manhattan. I can almost guarantee that if it comes to my metro region, they'll center it only in D.C., it won't do well (because of the regional demographics) and once again the D.C. metro region will miss out on some of these interesting consumer offerings because nobody from the West Coast can be bothered to learn about different places.

Funnily enough, I live in DC, in the city, and I'm part of the car-free urban demographic I described, as are many of my friends and coworkers, and I could see a lot of us making pretty heavy use of this kind of service... and comparing myself/my peer group to, e.g., Gaithersburg or Loudoun County, was exactly what I had in mind with my comment, where I think the former is much more likely to be successful.

Totally agreed, though, that the focus shouldn't just be on NYC and SF, and that the DC metro area and the Bay are demographically similar.

Honestly, I'm always curious why we don't see Chicago in these kinds of services as well. I totally get why NYC, but there's a lot of cities in the country between NYC and the Bay Area that have better characteristics for this kind of service. (there's lots also, for demographic reasons, wouldn't be ideal as well).

I try not to spend much time in D.C., but I'm conflicted if the demographics are good enough yet, in the city proper, to support something like this. I recognize the city is changing very rapidly and might be at a point where this makes sense now.

I can tell you that at least in Loudoun and Fairfax counties, there's enough work-at-home and stay-at-home folks, and good road infrastructure, and suitable density, that this would probably be successful. Most of the local grocery stores and restaurants stay pretty busy running things around.