The scooters are stored in the entrance to the premises. The delivery men wait in a break room between two rounds.
Quick commerce start-ups are springing up like mushrooms in the city. One of them, the Turkish company Getir, has been established in France for almost nine months now. It has nearly 50 local warehouses in Ile-de-France alone, including around ten in the capital. One of its latest dark stores – or “gstore” according to Getir – opened in the town of Clichy, in the Hauts-de-Seine, in place of a former mobile phone shop.
ZDNet went there to meet the teams of Getir and its general manager France, Alec Dent, on the occasion of the announcement of the signing of the 350and young CIE contract with Pôle emploi.
From the outside, it’s hard to imagine what’s going on behind the walls, where delivery people and CDI order pickers are busy all day. On the sidewalk, no garbage cans lying around, no yellow and purple scooters in the colors of the start-up. You have to push the door to find the vehicles, bicycles and electric scooters, parked in rows of onions between two rounds.
Further, the goods are stored in a back room separated from the entrance by a counter, where the order pickers fill the bags and make sure that no product is missing.
Orders placed by customers are prepared directly from the warehouses. The customer does not go to the store, the store comes to him.
On game nights, it’s pizza galore
The premises, seemingly calm, are managed by a “team lead”, a central position in the organization of the gstore, since it is the one who follows the comings and goings of the delivery people. Everything (or almost) happens behind the scenes, on the Getir application. This is where customers choose from a selection of 2,000 products, fresh food, drinks, snacks of all kinds, laundry detergent and baby diapers. Local warehouses are replenished every day and stocks are updated in real time to limit disappointments.
Typically, on game nights, pizzas go like hot cakes, an employee of Getir told ZDNet. The rest of the time, fresh products, snacks, fruits and vegetables are the most popular products, ahead of alcohol in fourth position, comments Gabriel Diaz, a former Deliveroo who became head of expansion at Getir.
Like Gorillas, Cajoo, Flink and the others, Getir attracts its customers with promo codes and promises of very short delivery times (10 to 15 minutes on average). However, Getir displays on the application the estimated time of arrival (ETA) of the order to “limit stress among delivery people”, notes Gabriel Diaz.
The waltz of the delivery men lasts all day, starting “very early in the morning until very late in the evening”, can we read on the website. Unlike start-ups that deliver ready-made meals, Getir does not see a peak in orders around meals, just “a few points more” than the rest of the day, estimates Alec Dent.
A more mass market than premium player
The sector has experienced a very rapid growth, encouraged by the habits acquired during the confinements. If this kind of ultra-fast service overshadows local businesses in commercial areas, competition is especially raging between the delivery start-ups themselves.
However, “there is room for everyone”, wants to believe Alec Dent. “With 2,000 references, we do not attract all categories of customers. We are rather “mass market”, when others are rather premium”, he specifies.
The sudden surge of these new players leads to tensions over the status of these dark stores, which sometimes describe themselves as warehouses, and sometimes as businesses. In Clichy, Getir has chosen the status of trade. Alec Dent admits that there is still “a bit of a gray area” because of this relatively nascent activity in France. “The market is going fast, but our interest is to stay. We are at the beginning of the story,” he says. For the next stage of its development, Getir already wants to open a network of franchises.