Startups have also been hammering away on the idea in the last few years, leaning on so-called dark stores — mini warehouses, more or less — to provide a local supply of goods that can be whisked to consumers’ doors in record time. GoPuff has raised a tectonic amount of capital, for example, as have a host of other startups around the world. The model, called quick commerce — q-commerce for short — attracted billions of dollars in funding in recent years.
Who could have seen this coming?
Consumers wanted deliveries, and they wanted them quickly, and companies that were in that game were doing well. So why not try the same model, but even faster? Wouldn’t consumers love that even more? So long as you had a model in mind that could make the math shake out at least on paper — thank you, dark stores! — it was off to the races.
