7 ms·

I don't get your question. Curb-side pickup is better as having a ton of people inside small grocery stores considering all of them are not meant to handle lar

I don't get your question. Curb-side pickup is better as having a ton of people inside small grocery stores considering all of them are not meant to handle large amounts of people attempting to keep a set distance from each-other. If curb-side pickup becomes more popular they would increase available slots by allocating more resources. What is happening right now is you have one or two managing curb-side and a ton inside managing everyone else. What should happen is grocery stores should be closed except for employees and your groceries should be delivered to you, or you pick them up curb side. It would eliminate a whole realm of issues with people not following rules, coughing on produce, not washing hands, moeny exchange, long lines, etc. And if you implemented a strict health check on employees it would be way easier for everyone.

thecodemonkey 7y ago
I think that is the ideal situation too. Closing down grocery stores and allowing no-touch curbside pickup (or delivery) only. I don't quite know what the economics of this is like though, and if it is a viable option across the board. Edit: typo
dewey 7y ago
> What should happen is grocery stores should be closed except for employees and your groceries should be delivered to you, or you pick them up curb side. Of course that would be ideal, but scaling up a delivery service from scratch is a bit harder than keeping a store running and offering both services which distributes the load a bit.
- djrogers 7y ago
  this is not a delivery service - it's curbside pickup.
  - dewey 7y ago
    Sorry. Looks like I misunderstood that, I thought it means that they put it in front of your house.
  - kelnos 7y ago
    It still takes extra staff to make this happen. Normal grocery staff isn't just wandering around the store aimlessly; they're restocking and doing other administrative tasks. Most of those tasks don't just go away when you move to a curbside pickup model. You still need to hire and train more people to fulfill orders.
    - perl4ever 7y ago
      "they're restocking and doing other administrative tasks. Most of those tasks don't just go away when you move to a curbside pickup model" This may be true in practice, right now, but do things really have to go to the shelves and then the curb?
      - kelnos 7y ago
        They have to go somewhere. Perhaps if a store went to a curbside-only model they'd organize things in the store based on popularity so the people fulfilling orders could be more efficient, but it still takes people working throughout the day to make that happen.
    - mjwhansen 7y ago
      Many of the stores offering curbside, like Wegmans, are using Instacart shoppers, so it's not taking away store employees per se.
seltzered_ 7y ago
Fair point! Realizing I haven't thought about curbside as much as only the larger grocery store chains seem to offer it (though delivery seems to be universal). Farmers market here is doing a pre-order drive-through arrangement this weekend after weeks of essentially being closed.
giggles_giggles 7y ago
Hi, my wife is on an immunosuppressant and so we have been trying to avoid going to the store at all, except curbside, because it could be extremely bad if she were to get COVID-19. Save for a single emergency, no one in our household has left home in about a month. This service makes it harder for us to get curbside slots, until our local store is able to respond to peaking demand, because people with normal immune systems will use these slots out of fear, when they have a much better chance of either not contracting COVID-19 in the first place, or of lesser symptoms if they get it, and in the meantime should be the ones going into the store, so that those with immuno-compromised households do not have to. Your service makes no acknowledgement of this ethical dilemma. I do not disagree that our local grocery store should do its best to expand its curbside service. They do seem to be trying, but this product makes it harder for households like ours in the meantime.
- mjwhansen 7y ago
  It sounds like this crisis has been especially frustrating to you and my heart goes out to you. One of the reasons we decided to release the app was so friends of ours who are immunocompromised could use it. The ideal scenario would be for grocery stores to switch to curbside/delivery only. I wouldn't be surprised if we saw that happening 6 months from now. None of us know if we are asymptomatic carriers, so we all need to stay out of the public as much as possible. Our thinking if that if people start using this app, they're staying out of the stores, keeping themselves and the workers safer. Hopefully they can do several weeks worth of shopping at a time, freeing up slots for others. In the UK, Sainsbury's is limiting curbside and delivery to high risk people. But they're only able to do so because they're getting a list of high-risk people from the government and validating against that list. That isn't really possible for us. https://www.sainsburys.co.uk/shop/gb/groceries/working-to-feed-the-nation-/latest-information-- https://www.sainsburys.co.uk/shop/gb/groceries/working-to-fe... Do we support grocery stores in your area? Hopefully this app can help your family, too.
  - giggles_giggles 7y ago
    > One of the reasons we decided to release the app was so friends of ours who are immunocompromised could use it. Understandable, but it becomes a gold rush if people with normal immune systems use sites like yours to reserve slots. My only real suggestion is that your site call out the moral dilemma to users. Basically our only choice now is to use a service like this (which I guess I will now do; yes you do cover our area) or book slots weeks in advance (this is what we have been doing with limited success). Honestly we are very lucky; services like this make me more concerned for people in situations like my wife's, but who are not married to a programmer who is aware that you need a f*king web scraper to get groceries now. Apologies if my frustration is visibly surfacing there; I know y'all are just trying to do your best to help with this situation and so I want to provide you with some honest feedback. I would also like to make clear that I'm not suggesting your service is a net negative. Thank you for your efforts.
mandelbrotwurst 7y ago
How does curbside pickup reduce the number of people in the stores? Does it involve something other than swapping out customers picking their groceries off the shelves for employees doing the same?
- darawk 7y ago
  Economies of scale. Employees doing the picking is much more organized and requires far less people than customers doing it themselves.
- kelnos 7y ago
  It's not just about reducing the absolute number, it's about reducing the number of possible interactions. Let's say there are 20 employees in the store fulfilling orders, and they work in two shifts during the day. So that's 40 people in the store that have the potential to interact with each other (though it's really more like two separate groups of 20). If they do the curbside dropoff in a safe manner (that is, without physically interacting with the customer), then it's mostly those 40 people risking transmitting the disease to each other, and that's it. If you instead allow 20 random people into the supermarket at a time (in reality it's going to be more, which is even worse), and they spend an average of 45 minutes in the store, and their entry and exist times are randomized throughout the day, you have hundreds of people who could potentially interact with and infect each other. Employees will just naturally be much faster and efficient at gathering groceries than customers will be. They know the layout of the store and where everything is better, and they may also know that certain things are not available, so they won't waste time looking for them. They can even multitask and take care of more than one person's order at a time. They won't be wandering around making impulse purchases, but will be sticking to a fixed list of items the customer ordered. Checkout and bagging will go much faster. This bit is optional, but they could even optimize things further by grouping the most common items in one place, and not stocking shelves like they usually do[0]. I imagine you can serve the same number of customers with much less than half as many people in the store. There's also the matter of discipline when it comes to distancing. I imagine the supermarket employees are pushed hard to maintain social distancing with each other while working. When I went to the supermarket a week ago, probably a good 20% of the customers I encountered were failing at distancing, further increasing risk. [0] Consider that placement of items in a supermarket designed for customers wandering around is intentionally not set up for efficiency! They want you to walk through the entire store when making typical shopping run, in the hope that you'll make a bunch of other impulse purchases.
nickpsecurity 7y ago
"If curb-side pickup becomes more popular they would increase available slots by allocating more resources. What is happening right now is you have one or two managing curb-side and a ton inside managing everyone else." You're ignoring how it's a costly loss-leader for them. The pickers cost money. The storage space costs money with additions of new customers using the space designed for less until an expansion happens. One, little building might be in the six digits. The IT systems are probably older ones designed for lower volume. They have to integrate with all the other enterprise systems. There's a lot more going on in big companies scaling up than just add more people or slots.
goatinaboat 7y ago
they would increase available slots by allocating more resources This isn’t AWS where you click a button to scale. Real world scaling has lead times such as “acquiring a new building”, “buying more vehicles” (which need to be manufactured) and “hiring and training more people”.

thecodemonkey 7y ago

I think that is the ideal situation too. Closing down grocery stores and allowing no-touch curbside pickup (or delivery) only. I don't quite know what the economics of this is like though, and if it is a viable option across the board. Edit: typo

dewey 7y ago

> What should happen is grocery stores should be closed except for employees and your groceries should be delivered to you, or you pick them up curb side. Of course that would be ideal, but scaling up a delivery service from scratch is a bit harder than keeping a store running and offering both services which distributes the load a bit.

djrogers 7y ago
this is not a delivery service - it's curbside pickup.
- dewey 7y ago
  Sorry. Looks like I misunderstood that, I thought it means that they put it in front of your house.
- kelnos 7y ago
  It still takes extra staff to make this happen. Normal grocery staff isn't just wandering around the store aimlessly; they're restocking and doing other administrative tasks. Most of those tasks don't just go away when you move to a curbside pickup model. You still need to hire and train more people to fulfill orders.
  - perl4ever 7y ago
    "they're restocking and doing other administrative tasks. Most of those tasks don't just go away when you move to a curbside pickup model" This may be true in practice, right now, but do things really have to go to the shelves and then the curb?
    - kelnos 7y ago
      They have to go somewhere. Perhaps if a store went to a curbside-only model they'd organize things in the store based on popularity so the people fulfilling orders could be more efficient, but it still takes people working throughout the day to make that happen.
  - mjwhansen 7y ago
    Many of the stores offering curbside, like Wegmans, are using Instacart shoppers, so it's not taking away store employees per se.

seltzered_ 7y ago

Fair point! Realizing I haven't thought about curbside as much as only the larger grocery store chains seem to offer it (though delivery seems to be universal). Farmers market here is doing a pre-order drive-through arrangement this weekend after weeks of essentially being closed.

giggles_giggles 7y ago

Hi, my wife is on an immunosuppressant and so we have been trying to avoid going to the store at all, except curbside, because it could be extremely bad if she were to get COVID-19. Save for a single emergency, no one in our household has left home in about a month. This service makes it harder for us to get curbside slots, until our local store is able to respond to peaking demand, because people with normal immune systems will use these slots out of fear, when they have a much better chance of either not contracting COVID-19 in the first place, or of lesser symptoms if they get it, and in the meantime should be the ones going into the store, so that those with immuno-compromised households do not have to. Your service makes no acknowledgement of this ethical dilemma. I do not disagree that our local grocery store should do its best to expand its curbside service. They do seem to be trying, but this product makes it harder for households like ours in the meantime.

mjwhansen 7y ago
It sounds like this crisis has been especially frustrating to you and my heart goes out to you. One of the reasons we decided to release the app was so friends of ours who are immunocompromised could use it. The ideal scenario would be for grocery stores to switch to curbside/delivery only. I wouldn't be surprised if we saw that happening 6 months from now. None of us know if we are asymptomatic carriers, so we all need to stay out of the public as much as possible. Our thinking if that if people start using this app, they're staying out of the stores, keeping themselves and the workers safer. Hopefully they can do several weeks worth of shopping at a time, freeing up slots for others. In the UK, Sainsbury's is limiting curbside and delivery to high risk people. But they're only able to do so because they're getting a list of high-risk people from the government and validating against that list. That isn't really possible for us. https://www.sainsburys.co.uk/shop/gb/groceries/working-to-feed-the-nation-/latest-information-- https://www.sainsburys.co.uk/shop/gb/groceries/working-to-fe... Do we support grocery stores in your area? Hopefully this app can help your family, too.
- giggles_giggles 7y ago
  > One of the reasons we decided to release the app was so friends of ours who are immunocompromised could use it. Understandable, but it becomes a gold rush if people with normal immune systems use sites like yours to reserve slots. My only real suggestion is that your site call out the moral dilemma to users. Basically our only choice now is to use a service like this (which I guess I will now do; yes you do cover our area) or book slots weeks in advance (this is what we have been doing with limited success). Honestly we are very lucky; services like this make me more concerned for people in situations like my wife's, but who are not married to a programmer who is aware that you need a f*king web scraper to get groceries now. Apologies if my frustration is visibly surfacing there; I know y'all are just trying to do your best to help with this situation and so I want to provide you with some honest feedback. I would also like to make clear that I'm not suggesting your service is a net negative. Thank you for your efforts.

mandelbrotwurst 7y ago

How does curbside pickup reduce the number of people in the stores? Does it involve something other than swapping out customers picking their groceries off the shelves for employees doing the same?

darawk 7y ago
Economies of scale. Employees doing the picking is much more organized and requires far less people than customers doing it themselves.
kelnos 7y ago
It's not just about reducing the absolute number, it's about reducing the number of possible interactions. Let's say there are 20 employees in the store fulfilling orders, and they work in two shifts during the day. So that's 40 people in the store that have the potential to interact with each other (though it's really more like two separate groups of 20). If they do the curbside dropoff in a safe manner (that is, without physically interacting with the customer), then it's mostly those 40 people risking transmitting the disease to each other, and that's it. If you instead allow 20 random people into the supermarket at a time (in reality it's going to be more, which is even worse), and they spend an average of 45 minutes in the store, and their entry and exist times are randomized throughout the day, you have hundreds of people who could potentially interact with and infect each other. Employees will just naturally be much faster and efficient at gathering groceries than customers will be. They know the layout of the store and where everything is better, and they may also know that certain things are not available, so they won't waste time looking for them. They can even multitask and take care of more than one person's order at a time. They won't be wandering around making impulse purchases, but will be sticking to a fixed list of items the customer ordered. Checkout and bagging will go much faster. This bit is optional, but they could even optimize things further by grouping the most common items in one place, and not stocking shelves like they usually do[0]. I imagine you can serve the same number of customers with much less than half as many people in the store. There's also the matter of discipline when it comes to distancing. I imagine the supermarket employees are pushed hard to maintain social distancing with each other while working. When I went to the supermarket a week ago, probably a good 20% of the customers I encountered were failing at distancing, further increasing risk. [0] Consider that placement of items in a supermarket designed for customers wandering around is intentionally not set up for efficiency! They want you to walk through the entire store when making typical shopping run, in the hope that you'll make a bunch of other impulse purchases.

nickpsecurity 7y ago

"If curb-side pickup becomes more popular they would increase available slots by allocating more resources. What is happening right now is you have one or two managing curb-side and a ton inside managing everyone else." You're ignoring how it's a costly loss-leader for them. The pickers cost money. The storage space costs money with additions of new customers using the space designed for less until an expansion happens. One, little building might be in the six digits. The IT systems are probably older ones designed for lower volume. They have to integrate with all the other enterprise systems. There's a lot more going on in big companies scaling up than just add more people or slots.

goatinaboat 7y ago

they would increase available slots by allocating more resources This isn’t AWS where you click a button to scale. Real world scaling has lead times such as “acquiring a new building”, “buying more vehicles” (which need to be manufactured) and “hiring and training more people”.