Delivery service to roll out at two S.D. commissaries

At last, some military commissaries are trying their own version of Instacart. Welcome to the modern world.

Two San Diego bases are among eight nationwide taking part in a pilot test of a new shop-from-home grocery delivery service for military-connected customers.

U.S. Military Academy graduate Harold Earls IV, 29, was in town last week to check in on commissaries at the Miramar Marine Corps base and Naval Base San Diego at 32nd Street, where he says the service will roll out June 1 for a 90-day trial. His company, YouUp, won the West Coast contract covering three bases, including one in Washington state.

The idea blossomed when he was stationed at the Army base in Fort Myer, Va., in 2020. Earls was shopping at the local Giant supermarket with his wife, Rachel, and their two young boys.

Why didn’t base commissaries make home deliveries like most major grocery stores, Rachel asked.

The Earls were entitled to shop at the commissary, where they could buy groceries at cost. Instead, with little kids and little time, they found themselves relying on a supermarket near their house because it was easier and more convenient.

So, invoking the old proverb, “Necessity is the mother of invention,” the West Point graduate took his wife’s complaint to heart upon retiring from active duty.

He enlisted his friend and mentor, Douglas Vercellotti, former chief of staff of Dell Technologies, to help formulate a business plan and assemble a core team of vets with business experience.

“We were just trying to solve a problem that existed in our own military community,” Earls says. “We reached out to the commissaries, and they said they were interested.” As it turned out, the U.S. Defense Commissary Agency (DeCA) was formulating a similar e-commerce concept.

Earls’ goal was to make shopping more convenient, along with reviving flagging commissary sales, to enable commissary operators to negotiate greater discounts from suppliers and distributors which, in turn, would be passed on to customers.

Commissary groceries are sold at cost by government mandate and not subject to sales tax. The YouUp plan would include the 5 percent fee for the commissary, plus, to cover its operating expenses, a delivery charge of roughly $4.

Currently, commissary shoppers get a mandated 23.7 percent savings even after the 5 percent commissary use surcharge is deducted.

There is another benefit — the hiring of military spouses (reported to be 22 percent underemployed compared to their civilian counterparts) and veterans with military base access to deliver the groceries.

The website, youup.us/ hire, is soliciting applications for deliverers, or carriers, who will be paid $20 an hour, plus customer tips. Unlike Instacart workers, they don’t actually shop in the store but pick up orders bagged by commissary workers and placed at the curb.

That’s because the Defense Commissary Agency