Tobie Schwarz | Getty
In May 2021, grocery delivery company Zapp moved into a small garage, wedged between red-brick apartment buildings on a residential street called Fagelstraat in northwest Amsterdam. Many locals had never heard of Dark Stores, the mini-warehouses that grocery apps use to ship local deliveries. “We weren’t sure what they were doing or what kind of business it was,” says Alex (pseudonym), a local resident.
In less than a year, this small Fagelstraat garage has become an extreme example of how dark shops can clash with local neighbors. Alex, who has lived on the streets for seven years and requested anonymity to avoid further disputes with passengers, says there are now 10-15 deliveries a day and giant lorries regularly block the narrow road. “It’s a 24/7 business,” he says, “so passengers come in and out late at night and early in the morning. At 2 am I often have people standing outside my window, smoking and talking very loudly while they take a break. After a month of that, runners and residents began to clash as tensions boiled over, Alex says. “There were a few instances where I almost got into a fight,” he says. “A [rider] was completely in my face. It was quite scary.
Over the past year, the spread of dark stores has accelerated rapidly as grocery delivery apps Gorillas, Getir, Flink and Zapp compete for dominance in the Dutch market. In January there was 31 dark shops just in Amsterdam. The Netherlands attracts these companies because the country is small, densely populated and flat, which means it’s easy for their couriers to operate, says Yara Wiemer, an analyst at research and consultancy firm Kantar. Demand is also booming. The number of Dutch consumers using grocery delivery apps exceeds tripled to 700,000 between 2021 and January 2022, according to Wiemer. But as the four apps jostle for dark store space in residential areas so they can offer faster deliveries, complaints about noise, bikes blocking sidewalks and increased traffic have become common. in all the countries.
In Amsterdam, such complaints also accuse dark store staff of bullying, sexual harassment and initiating physical fights, and city residents are rallying to evict delivery apps from their neighborhoods.
The Fagelstraat has become the loudest example of a neighborhood mobilizing against a dark store. The street wrote a petition and launched its own PageInstagram to document the disturbance. A resident named Elisabeth recounts that one evening last fall, when she told staff at the dark Fagelstraat Zapp store to keep the noise down, a person in uniform – carried by both runners and staff from the warehouse – told him to stop complaining otherwise he would send his friends to his apartment. “They haven’t specified what they are going to do, but it’s obviously very threatening,” explains Elisabeth. She describes being followed several times late at night by people who then walked into Zapp’s dark store and says other residents complained of sexual harassment and calls.
Steve O’Hear, vice president of strategy at Zapp, said the company has a zero-tolerance policy on sexual harassment and he was “surprised” to hear about the assault between residents and drivers of the company’s dark Fagelstraat store. “We’ve been meeting with residents regularly since the very beginning, and those conversations have largely remained cordial,” he says.
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