Hungry after all that online shopping? If you live in the Seattle area, you won't even need to leave Amazon.com to order food straight to your door. The e-commerce giant quietly launched the still-unnamed service in Seattle last weekend during the Thanksgiving holiday lull, and while it's not perfect, the service could eventually be promising:
Nonetheless, just over 100 partner restaurants are signed on; delivery ranges vary, as expected, by location in the city. Food goes into your cart, and you of course charge the meal to your Amazon account. It still has kinks to be worked out, for sure — there's no way to sort by cuisine or search all of the menus at once, for example, so better build in time to guess and check whether you're craving yucca fries with your burger. [Grub Street]
While Bezos and co. say the new service will roll out gradually "unless things go gangbusters," a company as huge as Amazon certainly has a large enough platform to pose a threat to food delivery behemoths GrubHub and Seamless. But TechCrunch reports that Amazon has its sights set even higher, and is hoping to eventually merge its food delivery service with other nascent projects like its point-of-sale service, Amazon Local Register, and its grocery delivery service, Amazon Fresh. How everything pans out remains to be seen, but with any luck, the Bezos Empire will still be on the way up.
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