Cornershop

» see cornershopapp.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obituary ~

Cornershop opened in May 2015 in two cities at once, Santiago and Mexico City, which tells you the founders had done this before. They had: Oskar Hjertonsson and his co-founders had already built ClanDescuento and sold it to Groupon in 2010. The new promise was narrower and harder. Pick a supermarket, fill a basket, and somebody would walk the aisles for you and be at the door inside an hour.

The model ran on people. A shopper, often a student, took the order into the actual store and phoned you from the aisle when the brand you wanted was not on the shelf. Prices usually carried a markup over the shelf price, though some chains negotiated parity. It started with around a hundred shoppers in Chile and was running more than three thousand across eleven cities by 2018.

Grocery delivery in Santiago had no route to Ankara and never pretended to, so my interest here starts after the product. Its history was decided twice over by a competition regulator in a country it was not founded in.

~ the case file ~

~ cofece says no ~

Walmart announced on 13 September 2018 that it would buy Cornershop for 225 million dollars and take full control, keeping the founders and keeping the platform open to rival retailers. Chile's competition authority cleared it in January 2019. Mexico's did not.

COFECE blocked the deal in early June 2019, and the reasoning is worth reading because it is unusually specific about platform power. Cornershop could be used to refuse service to Walmart's competitors, and Walmart could pull its products from platforms competing with Cornershop. The merged firm would also hold the sales data that rival supermarkets were handing over just by being listed. Mitigation measures offered by both sides were judged insufficient. One estimate put Cornershop at about 73 percent of the food and drink marketplace segment under review.

~ by uber ~

Four months later, on 11 October 2019, Uber announced it was taking a majority stake in the same company that Walmart had just been forbidden to buy. Terms were undisclosed and the press settled on something near 450 million dollars for 51 percent. COFECE approved this one without conditions, reported in the middle of December 2020. On 21 June 2021 Uber said it would buy the rest in stock.

The name survived about twenty-nine months past that, increasingly as a label on something else. By July 2020 grocery ordering through Uber and Uber Eats already ran on Cornershop in five countries, and the app itself was eventually badged "Cornershop by Uber", which is the version preserved in its own logo.

~ the last aisle ~

On 16 March 2023 Uber told the staff of both apps what was coming. Marinus van Gestel, who ran Latin America, put it without decoration: the Cornershop app and brand would be integrated into Uber entirely. Users in Mexico and Chile were invited to move across before 2024, with Costa Rica on the same schedule, and the remaining countries were folded into the regular Uber app.

The Chilean app closed on 28 November 2023. More than three hundred workers were dismissed, and the local press covered the ending as a job story rather than a technology one, which was the right call. cornershopapp.com now redirects to Uber Eats. The logo on the last version of the app still reads "Cornershop", with "by Uber" underneath it in smaller letters, which is a reasonably honest picture of the whole arrangement.

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