history of delivery services in Russia

In the modern world, against the backdrop of a fast pace of life, changes in consumer habits during coronavirus restrictions and the introduction of new technologies, food and grocery delivery services in Russia are experiencing an impressive takeoff popularity.

Today we can enjoy a variety of dishes right at home thanks to fast and convenient delivery services. However, such services appeared in Russia not five, not ten, or even a hundred years ago. The history of food delivery in Russia has its analogues in the distant past.

Origins of the delivery service

Let's start with the Russian Empire, where the wealthy class, in general, never carried food or cooked for themselves. For this purpose, every self-respecting, wealthy citizen had servants. However, for poorer people (but still rich enough to shop at “Eliseevsky” or “Muir and Merilise“) in the shops there were so-called “boys” also known as “errand boys”. Their duties included all low-skilled work from cleaning the store to personal errands for the owner. The boys really lived up to the “title” of their position – usually they started working immediately after finishing primary school and were promoted at 16–18 years old. The duties of the “boys” also included the delivery of products according to customers’ requests. The best stores in Moscow and St. Petersburg had constantly updated printed product catalogs. And all products that were not perishable could be ordered by mail to anywhere in the Russian Empire.

Towards the end of the Russian Empire, car couriers also appeared. They were usually used directly by product manufacturers (for example, the dairy company “Pomeschik” – apartment building the company still adorns St. Petersburg). For them, this was not only a way to sell products, but also good PR – cars were new then and they (just like now) were covered with logos and advertising of manufacturing companies.

You could also send a janitor to do the shopping. Wipers in the Russian Empire they performed much more functions than they do now. They were de facto junior police officers, responsible for maintaining order, but also performed many other functions. Guarding the territory, carrying out small errands (including delivering groceries), maintaining cleanliness, collecting rent, helping residents prepare firewood for the winter and much more – all these are the functions of janitors in the Russian Empire. However, it was still not customary to “chase” janitors for food, and they were approached with such a request quite rarely.

There was an analogue of dark kitchens in the Russian Empire – cooks. We can say that they worked on the subscription model that is popular these days. If you had money, you paid once a month and received lunch at a set time every day, the menu was always different and could be individually customized. Kitchens could be either a full-fledged kitchen without a room for guests and only work for delivery, or they could have a hall for visitors. Again, drawing parallels, one can notice that at that time there was very cheap unskilled labor in the cities. So almost every establishment, restaurant, and tavern had its own deliveries. They were also in demand among ordinary people or workers, since installing a kitchen in their apartment was a very expensive pleasure.

In the Soviet Union, you could also order food to your home. However, this only applied to products orders from restaurants remained the privilege of the authorities – for the rest such pleasure was prohibited by sanitary standards. Moreover, you could use unofficial (and, accordingly, illegal) methods – there were quite a lot of people willing to deliver groceries to your home for a small fee. So there was a completely official opportunity – some stores (especially in big cities) had a so-called “order desk”. Shipping was officially free.

Delivery services in the USSR used the same methods to increase their profitability that can be found now. For example, prices for the same goods purchased in a store or ordered to your home could differ by 15–40%. There was also an analogue of the minimum order price – there were “mandatory” goods and their quantity, without the purchase of which the store could completely refuse to accept the order. However, order tables also had an important advantage: many scarce products could only be purchased in this way.

Usually the order was made by phone (which already speaks about the average income and social status of those ordering – not everyone had a phone even in the 80s) and was delivered the next day. The variety of delivery methods was not inferior to today's – foot couriers, bicycles, motorcycles, cars and trucks. There were no delivery robots.

Delivery under the reign of N.S. Khrushchev

Under Khrushchev in Moscow, it was possible to order food at pick-up points (POPs): you could pick up food from the metro, train station or other specific place. Such points were usually both issuing points and order receiving points. You could place an order by phone and pick it up at such a point (cheaper than home delivery), or place an order at the same point on the way to work and pick it up there in the evening. Essentially in the 1960s in Moscow worked analogues of modern dark stores. Isaac Bookbinder, in his work “Orders and Home Delivery of Grocery Products,” estimated that 1.6 million orders were completed in 1960. This is ten times less than modern figures, but still impressive. At the same time, 75% of orders were fulfilled by five stores (in first place, of course, GUM). However, in the USSR there was no monopolization of the market: 1) stores in the USSR sold only their own goods through delivery, while the most popular delivery services today mainly deliver products from partners; 2) the final beneficiary of all stores in the USSR was the same – the state.

You paid for the order either when you placed it (if you placed it in the store) or upon receipt. By this time, delivery was no longer free and (in Moscow) the cost of the order included its assembly (2% of the cost) and delivery itself (from 30 kopecks to 1 ruble depending on the delivery distance, for understanding, for 1 ruble before the monetary reform of 1961 you could buy about 5–7 loaves of bread).

However, it is still worth noting that all of the above is true mainly for Moscow and partly for several other cities with good supplies. For example, in Leningrad, according to the director of store No. 1 “Lengastronom” Grigory Petrov, orders were accepted and delivered, including to fishing trawls and polar stations. And yet, in Leningrad itself there were noticeably fewer order tables and deliveries themselves than in Moscow, and Georgy Petrov himself noted that delivery was unprofitable for stores.

Silver age of delivery in the USSR

Delivery services continued their development during the Brezhnev era. Head of the working group for the development of an interregional target program for the development of coastal territories and coastal waters Alexander Uralov in interview recalls:

“Adult children could come to the grocery store with a table of orders and arrange delivery for their retired parents on the day they say. It was possible to order same-day delivery, but there might not be some products from the set that was on the menu. Let’s assume that out of 10–12 products that you have chosen, two are no longer available today. Smoked sausage or sprats. They said: “Come on, when they deliver it, then we’ll fill out the entire order for you.” I very often used the grocery store near Smolny. There was an order table. By the way, there were all sorts of alcoholic dessert drinks there, such as rowan in cognac, which was very scarce. There were also some Georgian wines in short supply, which were not in the regular trade department.”

During these years, the commission/surcharge amounted to 5–10% of the price of goods, and in some places the practice of mandatory inclusion of “loaded goods” in the order continued. You could save money if you ordered one of the ready-made kits rather than an individual assembly.

The seventies could be called the silver age of food delivery in Russia (and the golden age is obviously outside the window right now). However, with the beginning of the eighties, deficits began, the population's real incomes fell, followed by a drop in consumption. Order tables could not exist at the same time as “products on cards” and disappeared completely under Gorbachev.

After the collapse of the Soviet Union, during the crisis and restructuring of the country's economy, only some cafes and restaurants (very rarely shops) had delivery services, which covered a very small area and were rather the exception to the rule. The first large delivery services began to appear in 2003–2004 at the Domino's Pizza and Papa John's pizzeria chains. We are now witnessing the golden age of grocery and prepared food delivery.