Amazon has launched a UK grocery web site, taking on the established supermarket giants such as Tesco, Wal-Mart's Asda, Waitrose's Ocado and Sainsbury's.

Not only that, you can buy beer on the site. Perhaps the ultimate in laziness for the home-worker that cannot even be bothered to pop out to the local off-license anymore!

Of course you may well have to wait 8 days for it as the courier will get lost and then you'll have to pick it up from your local sorting office...

Massive growth in online supermarkets

Amazon launches the beta of its British grocery service this week.

"Find everything you need to stock your kitchen cupboards," reads the new page on Amazon.co.uk, promising a range of goods from fresh fruit, veg, meat and poultry through to dried goods, booze and lots more.

However, the online retailer will not give users the traditional two-hour time slots for planned deliveries, which may well put many dedicated online supermarket shoppers off the new service.

Online supermarket Ocado recently announced that it hopes to be valued at over £1 billion in the initial public offering later this month, a clear indicator of the massive value of the online grocery market in the UK.

Industry analysts at IGD forecast that the market for online shopping will double in total and be worth a whopping £7.2 billion pounds by 2014, according to Reuters.

In addition to the aforementioned booze, Amazon UK plans to sell over 22,000 products from established brands like Kraft, Pepsi and Procter & Gamble, some of which will be provided by third-party members of Amazon Marketplace.

I was reading about this in a paper today.
Amazon's prices aren't cheap at all by comparison.