What if you started carpooling for errands (even on foot)?
In this return to school weighed down by inflation, Jean, a young resident of Minimes, in the Pink City, encountered “butter in the spinach”. He “eats better”, organic even, without paying more. This computer alternative has joined the community of users of the brand new app caba shop. Exclusively Toulouse for the moment, it allows individuals to group orders with local merchants and then deliver to each other. Some sort of “carpooling” for shopping, even if Jean made his first three small rounds by metro and VéloToulouse. As a delivery man – for a maximum of five people – he indicates his journey and when he intends to do his shopping on the application. The other “cabashoppers” are added to the order. And he receives a small commission deducted from his receipt. “The operation resembles that of Blablacar, the payments are secure”, explains the one who makes “small savings” while managing “healthier things”. Jean also enriches his human relations, he has the presentiment that a “nice community” is in the making.
And, who knows, he might one day deliver a basket of groceries to Clothilde’s office downtown. This young worker, who works in agriculture, has just downloaded the app because she noticed that the first partner businesses – Bio C’Bon and Les Délices de Tunis aux Carmes – were precisely those where she was already using. “I keep my habits, I get delivered to the office and I don’t waste time in the evening,” she anticipates. La Toulousaine has tested quite a few delivery systems and she has often been disappointed with the service. “I like the idea of being delivered by people who do their shopping like me rather than by an underpaid delivery person,” she confides, not ruling out the idea of being a delivery person at her turn if the opportunity arises.
The little words in the family butcher’s shop
If it excites young people, this participatory and green solution for teaching is not really new. It is even with a whiff of nostalgia that Yohann Marconato created Cabashop with two of his engineer friends. He wanted to “revive the spirit” that reigned in his parents’ family butcher’s shop in Tournefeuille. “People left little notes on the cash register to find out if someone could deliver them, I even happened to do it myself on my little bike, for three francs six sous, real francs at the time” , he says. And needless to say, the 30-year-old is all for the cause of small traders, who have neither the time nor the logistics to set up their own delivery service.
Cabashop, which takes its momentum in the 1Kubator incubator, is doing its ranges in the center of Toulouse. But the app, which is remunerated by a commission on orders, also wants to seduce company employees, export to the suburbs – and first and foremost to designated Tournefeuille – then gradually conquer Occitania and all of France.