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The fundamental problem here is grocery stores and others needlessly limiting when they make pickups available. Lots of people are sitting at home with extreme

The fundamental problem here is grocery stores and others needlessly limiting when they make pickups available. Lots of people are sitting at home with extreme schedule flexibility, and would be happy to choose a slot 10 days out or whatever. Instead there is the silliness (and third-party app workarounds like this) of only releasing slots much closer. In other conversation I have seen the following explanation: those systems were designed for a much different supply demand balance than we see today, they just haven't had time to adjust things yet.

protonimitate 7y ago
> those systems were designed for a much different supply demand balance than we see today, they just haven't had time to adjust things yet. I feel like as much as this app is well intentioned, it will only make this problem worse. The bottle neck isn't on the technology side. It's on the operations side. Extending the order window ahead would work, but they'd have to do a "check in" before hand to actually pick your order, otherwise you wouldn't be able to know if things will be in stock 10 days ahead of time.
- nogabebop23 7y ago
  Yes - I bought a microphone that was in-stock for pick-up and a week later sent a "hey, what's up?" email and got a "order ready for pickup" email an hour later. There was no one in the store but they had 10x the number of pickup orders to process. Its a operational capacity problem, not a scheduling one.
bdcravens 7y ago
HEB used to let you schedule out further in the future, but it looks like they've now reduced that to 7 days.
CamperBob2 7y ago
What I've found annoying with Amazon Fresh in particular is that they don't tell you there are no slots available until after you spend half an hour fighting with their search engine and populating the cart. And then, as you point out, they only show a few slots in the immediate future with large Xs across them. Yeah, thanks, guys, that's really helpful. You've been screwing around with grocery delivery for what, 15+ years now, and still can't make it work?
BurningFrog 7y ago
> needlessly limiting What looks simple from the outside is often much harder when you actually do it. I assume the stores want to sell as much as possible, from greed if nothing else. If there are bottlenecks in making that happen, they're probably hard to overcome quickly. ...I guess I just got annoyed by the word "needlessly"...
mantap 7y ago
Strongly disagree. The slots will immediately book out to the last available date. So if slots are available in 10 days that just means that everybody has to wait 10 days for their delivery. Increasing latency doesn't increase throughput.
jlokier 7y ago
> only releasing slots much close Unfortunately, not really. Releasing later slots barely helps but it makes delays longer. I recommend reading up a little queuing theory. When there's more demand than supply, the queue will grow unboundedly, and so will the average waiting time. What this means for online shopping is the same as what it means for web sites: Latency gets continually longer for almost everyone at the same time, while throughput doesn't noticably change. I saw an online grocery store open up slots for more months in advance recently. Now all the delivery slots are fully booked for the next 4 months. That's up to the limit of their calendar. It is still not possible to book a slot. If they open up further into the future, those slots will be fully booked too. I said you can't book. Actually you can sometimes book a slot by waiting until they add new slots at the end, which rolls over at midnight. That's a little silly of them: The site becomes unresponsive for 20 minutes at midnight as everyone tries to catch the new slots. Most people will find that when the site finally responds, the slots are gone. If you were unlucky enough to be placing an order before midnight whose slot expires just after, you may be disappointed to find you can't complete checkout during the critical 20 minutes, and lose your slot. The effect for nearly everyone is now they can book with 4 months of delay instead of 1 month. Actually getting one at 1 month was a lottery. But that hasn't changed, it's still a lottery at 4 months.
james_s_tayler 7y ago
Release slots ahead of time and people will just pre-book the slots in advance right? Meaning if you want a slot now you wait a lot longer.
agent008t 7y ago
Why not just deal with this in the same way as we deal with other goods and services that are in short supply - increase the price until there is an equilibrium? Ideally, one should be able to bid on delivery slots. If that is technically difficult, the delivery company should just increase the price. They could then increase the pay of the staff involved in making deliveries to attract more workers, especially those that are now out of work. More deliveries made overall! Or, if it is infeasible to increase the number of deliveries, they could donate the surplus profits locally. Not increasing the prices seems like just pointless virtue-signalling that helps absolutely nobody.
- nicoburns 7y ago
  Because pricing people out of necessities like food is really bad idea.
  - agent008t 7y ago
    I do not see much of a difference between something being affordable in theory, but unavailable in practice, and unaffordable but available. The latter offers some advantages: 1. Increased prices on scarce goods discourage frivolous consumption. 2. Vulnerable people, if they can be identified, can be subsidized or have their fees waived. 3. Those that find they really need a delivery can still book it - something that is currently impossible. 4. Funds can be raised for good causes. 5. People do not have to waste time queuing/trying to get a slot. If you like, you could operate both systems at the same time - allocate some slots on a first-come-first-served basis, and some slots on a market supply-and-demand basis. And of course, delivery is not a necessity for many: a lot of those booking slots at the moment could just go to a shop and buy the groceries in person. A market system would discourage them booking delivery slots.

protonimitate 7y ago

> those systems were designed for a much different supply demand balance than we see today, they just haven't had time to adjust things yet. I feel like as much as this app is well intentioned, it will only make this problem worse. The bottle neck isn't on the technology side. It's on the operations side. Extending the order window ahead would work, but they'd have to do a "check in" before hand to actually pick your order, otherwise you wouldn't be able to know if things will be in stock 10 days ahead of time.

nogabebop23 7y ago
Yes - I bought a microphone that was in-stock for pick-up and a week later sent a "hey, what's up?" email and got a "order ready for pickup" email an hour later. There was no one in the store but they had 10x the number of pickup orders to process. Its a operational capacity problem, not a scheduling one.

bdcravens 7y ago

HEB used to let you schedule out further in the future, but it looks like they've now reduced that to 7 days.

CamperBob2 7y ago

What I've found annoying with Amazon Fresh in particular is that they don't tell you there are no slots available until after you spend half an hour fighting with their search engine and populating the cart. And then, as you point out, they only show a few slots in the immediate future with large Xs across them. Yeah, thanks, guys, that's really helpful. You've been screwing around with grocery delivery for what, 15+ years now, and still can't make it work?

BurningFrog 7y ago

> needlessly limiting What looks simple from the outside is often much harder when you actually do it. I assume the stores want to sell as much as possible, from greed if nothing else. If there are bottlenecks in making that happen, they're probably hard to overcome quickly. ...I guess I just got annoyed by the word "needlessly"...

mantap 7y ago

Strongly disagree. The slots will immediately book out to the last available date. So if slots are available in 10 days that just means that everybody has to wait 10 days for their delivery. Increasing latency doesn't increase throughput.

jlokier 7y ago

> only releasing slots much close Unfortunately, not really. Releasing later slots barely helps but it makes delays longer. I recommend reading up a little queuing theory. When there's more demand than supply, the queue will grow unboundedly, and so will the average waiting time. What this means for online shopping is the same as what it means for web sites: Latency gets continually longer for almost everyone at the same time, while throughput doesn't noticably change. I saw an online grocery store open up slots for more months in advance recently. Now all the delivery slots are fully booked for the next 4 months. That's up to the limit of their calendar. It is still not possible to book a slot. If they open up further into the future, those slots will be fully booked too. I said you can't book. Actually you can sometimes book a slot by waiting until they add new slots at the end, which rolls over at midnight. That's a little silly of them: The site becomes unresponsive for 20 minutes at midnight as everyone tries to catch the new slots. Most people will find that when the site finally responds, the slots are gone. If you were unlucky enough to be placing an order before midnight whose slot expires just after, you may be disappointed to find you can't complete checkout during the critical 20 minutes, and lose your slot. The effect for nearly everyone is now they can book with 4 months of delay instead of 1 month. Actually getting one at 1 month was a lottery. But that hasn't changed, it's still a lottery at 4 months.

james_s_tayler 7y ago

Release slots ahead of time and people will just pre-book the slots in advance right? Meaning if you want a slot now you wait a lot longer.

agent008t 7y ago

Why not just deal with this in the same way as we deal with other goods and services that are in short supply - increase the price until there is an equilibrium? Ideally, one should be able to bid on delivery slots. If that is technically difficult, the delivery company should just increase the price. They could then increase the pay of the staff involved in making deliveries to attract more workers, especially those that are now out of work. More deliveries made overall! Or, if it is infeasible to increase the number of deliveries, they could donate the surplus profits locally. Not increasing the prices seems like just pointless virtue-signalling that helps absolutely nobody.

nicoburns 7y ago
Because pricing people out of necessities like food is really bad idea.
- agent008t 7y ago
  I do not see much of a difference between something being affordable in theory, but unavailable in practice, and unaffordable but available. The latter offers some advantages: 1. Increased prices on scarce goods discourage frivolous consumption. 2. Vulnerable people, if they can be identified, can be subsidized or have their fees waived. 3. Those that find they really need a delivery can still book it - something that is currently impossible. 4. Funds can be raised for good causes. 5. People do not have to waste time queuing/trying to get a slot. If you like, you could operate both systems at the same time - allocate some slots on a first-come-first-served basis, and some slots on a market supply-and-demand basis. And of course, delivery is not a necessity for many: a lot of those booking slots at the moment could just go to a shop and buy the groceries in person. A market system would discourage them booking delivery slots.