Shopping at home in 10 minutes maybe we don’t care much anymore

For a few months, shopping at home in ten minutes seemed to us the future towards which we were headed. It was the months of the lockdown and in Germany a startup had launched a rocket that had found a way to realize that promise using well technology and neighborhood warehouses: order online and in 10 minutes everything arrives at your home.

Investors had gotten excited about putting in over a billion dollars, Gorillas’ valuation flew by making it the fastest growing startup in history, and that money had been used to finance growth in several European markets.

It wasn’t just Gorillas who played in this new league called quick-commerce, an ultra-fast evolution of ecommerce. Now the brakes: Gorillas has announced the dismissal of 300 people. The main competitor, the Turkish startup Getir, has also announced that it will lay off 14 percent of its employees, around 500 people. Mind you, the whole economy is holding back, and all companies are suffering from it. The mechanism is simple: with high interest rates, there is less money for investments and therefore there is a lack of capital to continue financing the growth of startups that continue to burn tens of millions of dollars a month to establish themselves. Gorillas, for example, lose 90 million a month.

Epperò perhaps it is quick commerce that is at the end of the line. A practice born during the lockdown, when it was complicated or not recommended to leave the house and the home shopping in ten minutes seemed to us cool. But now the pandemic seems to be behind us and we all have a craving to get out of the house. Around in our cities there are still big billboards of Gorillas and Getir that praise us the wonder of the ten minutes. They seem to be talking about the past.