7 ms·

Grocery stores should really just turn themselves into warehouses and only allow workers in the store. Grocery stores could provide safer working conditions by

by nprz 6y ago

Grocery stores should really just turn themselves into warehouses and only allow workers in the store. Grocery stores could provide safer working conditions by checking temps of employees before entering the store and providing masks and gloves for all workers. This would help mitigate the risk of covid exposure for both employees and customers.

itake 6y ago
That is basically what Whole Foods in SF is doing. They are only open to the public from like 9a-1p and from 1p-7p its delivery workers only.
chirau 6y ago
Not everyone can afford delivery fees, especially with these layoffs. And those fees are not small at all hey.
- s0rce 6y ago
  Then society should supplement their budget through social safety nets. I don't think its acceptable to risk the health of the grocery store employees because some people can't afford delivery (they don't even need delivery, just store pick up)
  - notyourday 6y ago
    Not everyone is interested in what a random "shopper" decide that someone is going to get. It was tried in USSR where the shopper was whoever was a manager of a supermarket. Those got solidly trounced when the first "swiss markets" showed up.
- xenihn 6y ago
  You can afford them if you buy 2+ months of groceries at a time.
  - michaelt 6y ago
    True, but so long as people are eating fresh bread, meat, fruit and milk they'll be going to the store for those - and won't they pick up the other things they need at the same time?
    - xenihn 6y ago
      The entire point is that people aren't going out.
- hkmurakami 6y ago
  I think this could be implemented with a pickup option
- wegs 6y ago
  Those fees are for everyone's safety. If other people have deliveries, I'm less likely to get sick and die. Delivery fees should be part of the stimulus. If everyone who can afford them paid delivery fees for everyone who can't, we'd all come out way ahead, both health-wise and economically. This is one of the biggest economic no-brainers since some states started making everyone wear a $2 cloth face mask to reduce R0.
  - standardUser 6y ago
    "If other people have deliveries, I'm less likely to get sick and die." Outside of the very worst-hit parts of the world, going shopping while taking precautions does not seem to be capable of raising the transmission rate to unacceptable levels. We're not trying to prevent every and all infection, only to keep the rate of new infections at a sustainable level.
    - wegs 6y ago
      Why do you say that? The US seems to have an R0 of right around 1 with lockdowns. Shopping is the major place people continue to intermingle. If we brought R0<<1, the virus would die off. If R0 > 1, we all get sick eventually. And aside from that, school and work closures are much more expensive than food delivery. The ROI of not having everyone congregate in stores seems huge in comparison.
      - standardUser 6y ago
        I say that because I don't think anyone expects the virus to die off, save for a mutation or herd immunity (via vaccine or otherwise). Lockdowns are not and never were intended to kill the virus. Only to control the spread.
barbecue_sauce 6y ago
This goes against labor trends in the supermarket industry since the early 1900s, and would increase labor needs considerably. The original grocery stores were full-service like this, but assortment was still small and tastes were provincial. Supermarkets have been shedding labor consistently since the full-service days, and are managed towards ever increasing the UPLH metric (Units Per Labor Hour). Instacart serves as a sort of stop gap measure during the uncertainties of this pandemic. The nature of Instacart "hiring" is non-binding: employees are not bound to do any amount of work, and Instacart is under no obligation to provide it. These 250,000 workers are not guaranteed any amount of wages or hours, which is much different than if the supermarket industry tried to do what you propose. That approach is much more appealing to the supermarket industry: as work surges, people who need the work do it, and as the work subsides, they fade into the wood work. Personally I advocate for strong worker rights and a healthy labor market, but it will take more than a pandemic to get the supermarket industry to increase their direct workforce significantly.
- dmix 6y ago
  Here in Ontario, Canada we have an online food delivery service (https://grocerygateway.com https://grocerygateway.com) and they built a super-automated distribution factory to help run this (and all of their stores in the area). A distribution center in the UK has already mastered this: > The Ocado Andover CFC is a three-storey grid of storage crates containing groceries. On top of the grid a fleet of 1,100 robots grab items and deliver them to “pick stations” where “personal shoppers” assemble orders for delivery. According to Ocado, an order of 50 items takes five minutes to pick and pack. http://www.canadiangrocer.com/top-stories/a-sneak-peak-at-the-future-of-grocery-automation-in-canada-81673 http://www.canadiangrocer.com/top-stories/a-sneak-peak-at-th... https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4DKrcpa8Z_E https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4DKrcpa8Z_E Google "automated grocery distribution", there's plenty of examples. This is essentially unskilled labour moving boxes from one point to another. The exception is vegetables/fruit where a human discards the bad stuff before it goes into another box for delivery on a truck. 95% of that process could be automated. Including eventually the delivery drivers in between the distribution center <-> retail endpoint pickup centers (where consumers and last-mile Instacart/delivery drivers can go in person for pickup - I'm assuming humans will be needed for home delivery for a long time). Instacarts biggest drawback is the cost and how they nickel-and-dime you, but GroceryGateway is run by the grocery store itself, and it's much better and actually helps you save money by shows you all the deals in the interface (imagine sorting a grocery store by discounts and price, as you walk through it gets more expensive). There is very little markup vs the stores, I've found it to be cheaper in practice, especially factoring in my time. A fully integrated/automated version of this with far less urban real estate + labour costs will bring the prices down significantly. I have a feeling only smaller luxury/farmers market/vegetable+fruit+meat only (+ semi-automated pantry section) shops will exist in the future. You don't really need to pick up most stuff by hand, but an in-person browsing UX can still be useful. Ikea stores are halfway to figuring this out.
mrfusion 6y ago
What about the idea that we should build up herd immunity in the summer so we’re not dealing with corona and flu in the fall? I guess we’d want healthy people to be out together if so. I heard that somewhere. Not sure if it makes sense.
- vkou 6y ago
  > What about the idea that we should build up herd immunity in the summer so we’re not dealing with corona and flu in the fall? Nobody currently knows whether or not getting COVID-19 makes you immune to getting it again.
  - mrfusion 6y ago
    Do you have a source? I can’t think of any other virus that works like that (except hiv which attacks the immune system)
    - barry-cotter 6y ago
      https://twitter.com/statesdj/status/1252698777296797698?s=21 https://twitter.com/statesdj/status/1252698777296797698?s=21 > If you’re hoping a vaccine is going to be a knight in shining armor saving the day, you may be in for a disappointment. SARSCOV2 is a highly contagious virus. A vaccine will need to induce durable high level immunity, but coronaviruses often don’t induce that kind of immunity 1/ > There’s a nice preprint just out on antibody responses to SARSCOV2. Lots of people don’t develop much of an IgM response and the IgG response fades noticeably after just two months https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2020.04.15.20066407v1.full.pdf https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2020.04.15.20066407v... 2/ This is consistent with the other human coronaviruses. They induce an immune response, but it tends to fade so the same virus can reinfect us a year or two later. https://t.co/MFQyjhZF0T?amp=1 https://t.co/MFQyjhZF0T?amp=1 3/ The experience with veterinary vaccines for coronaviruses is also not great. There are economically important coronaviruses infecting farm animals and we’ve been trying to develop good vaccines for decades. Most on these vaccines are putzy https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7138383/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7138383/ 4/ The thread’s longer but the prognosis is not good.
wolco 6y ago
They do this in some places. But still allow in customers. Checking tempature seems like a good way to avoid spreading other illnesses. Win-win.
CaptainZapp 6y ago
> Grocery stores could provide safer working conditions by checking temps of employees before entering the store and providing masks and gloves for all workers Checking temperatures is pretty much useless, when you can be totally asymptomatic, while spreading the virus for days. That's the big difference (and difficulty) as compared to the first version of SARS, where symptoms appeared virtually instantly after infection.
- creato 6y ago
  > Checking temperatures is pretty much useless, when you can be totally asymptomatic, while spreading the virus for days. It may not be 100% effective but it would surely help, possibly significantly. If we eliminated all but asymptomatic spread, how would that affect the reproduction rate?
- standardUser 6y ago
  It helps on the margins, just like masks and hand-washing. The more low-impact methods we can implement to reduce the transmission rate, the fewer high-impact methods are necessary.
Aloha 6y ago
Online grocery shopping takes me twice as long, and I lose out on the discoverability of a physical store.
- baby 6y ago
  We used to do it but we stopped because they don’t know how to pick fruits and vegetables, and they never know what a turnip is.

by nprz 6y ago

itake 6y ago

That is basically what Whole Foods in SF is doing. They are only open to the public from like 9a-1p and from 1p-7p its delivery workers only.

chirau 6y ago

Not everyone can afford delivery fees, especially with these layoffs. And those fees are not small at all hey.

s0rce 6y ago
Then society should supplement their budget through social safety nets. I don't think its acceptable to risk the health of the grocery store employees because some people can't afford delivery (they don't even need delivery, just store pick up)
- notyourday 6y ago
  Not everyone is interested in what a random "shopper" decide that someone is going to get. It was tried in USSR where the shopper was whoever was a manager of a supermarket. Those got solidly trounced when the first "swiss markets" showed up.
xenihn 6y ago
You can afford them if you buy 2+ months of groceries at a time.
- michaelt 6y ago
  True, but so long as people are eating fresh bread, meat, fruit and milk they'll be going to the store for those - and won't they pick up the other things they need at the same time?
  - xenihn 6y ago
    The entire point is that people aren't going out.
hkmurakami 6y ago
I think this could be implemented with a pickup option
wegs 6y ago
Those fees are for everyone's safety. If other people have deliveries, I'm less likely to get sick and die. Delivery fees should be part of the stimulus. If everyone who can afford them paid delivery fees for everyone who can't, we'd all come out way ahead, both health-wise and economically. This is one of the biggest economic no-brainers since some states started making everyone wear a $2 cloth face mask to reduce R0.
- standardUser 6y ago
  "If other people have deliveries, I'm less likely to get sick and die." Outside of the very worst-hit parts of the world, going shopping while taking precautions does not seem to be capable of raising the transmission rate to unacceptable levels. We're not trying to prevent every and all infection, only to keep the rate of new infections at a sustainable level.
  - wegs 6y ago
    Why do you say that? The US seems to have an R0 of right around 1 with lockdowns. Shopping is the major place people continue to intermingle. If we brought R0<<1, the virus would die off. If R0 > 1, we all get sick eventually. And aside from that, school and work closures are much more expensive than food delivery. The ROI of not having everyone congregate in stores seems huge in comparison.
    - standardUser 6y ago
      I say that because I don't think anyone expects the virus to die off, save for a mutation or herd immunity (via vaccine or otherwise). Lockdowns are not and never were intended to kill the virus. Only to control the spread.

barbecue_sauce 6y ago

This goes against labor trends in the supermarket industry since the early 1900s, and would increase labor needs considerably. The original grocery stores were full-service like this, but assortment was still small and tastes were provincial. Supermarkets have been shedding labor consistently since the full-service days, and are managed towards ever increasing the UPLH metric (Units Per Labor Hour). Instacart serves as a sort of stop gap measure during the uncertainties of this pandemic. The nature of Instacart "hiring" is non-binding: employees are not bound to do any amount of work, and Instacart is under no obligation to provide it. These 250,000 workers are not guaranteed any amount of wages or hours, which is much different than if the supermarket industry tried to do what you propose. That approach is much more appealing to the supermarket industry: as work surges, people who need the work do it, and as the work subsides, they fade into the wood work. Personally I advocate for strong worker rights and a healthy labor market, but it will take more than a pandemic to get the supermarket industry to increase their direct workforce significantly.

dmix 6y ago
Here in Ontario, Canada we have an online food delivery service (https://grocerygateway.com https://grocerygateway.com) and they built a super-automated distribution factory to help run this (and all of their stores in the area). A distribution center in the UK has already mastered this: > The Ocado Andover CFC is a three-storey grid of storage crates containing groceries. On top of the grid a fleet of 1,100 robots grab items and deliver them to “pick stations” where “personal shoppers” assemble orders for delivery. According to Ocado, an order of 50 items takes five minutes to pick and pack. http://www.canadiangrocer.com/top-stories/a-sneak-peak-at-the-future-of-grocery-automation-in-canada-81673 http://www.canadiangrocer.com/top-stories/a-sneak-peak-at-th... https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4DKrcpa8Z_E https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4DKrcpa8Z_E Google "automated grocery distribution", there's plenty of examples. This is essentially unskilled labour moving boxes from one point to another. The exception is vegetables/fruit where a human discards the bad stuff before it goes into another box for delivery on a truck. 95% of that process could be automated. Including eventually the delivery drivers in between the distribution center <-> retail endpoint pickup centers (where consumers and last-mile Instacart/delivery drivers can go in person for pickup - I'm assuming humans will be needed for home delivery for a long time). Instacarts biggest drawback is the cost and how they nickel-and-dime you, but GroceryGateway is run by the grocery store itself, and it's much better and actually helps you save money by shows you all the deals in the interface (imagine sorting a grocery store by discounts and price, as you walk through it gets more expensive). There is very little markup vs the stores, I've found it to be cheaper in practice, especially factoring in my time. A fully integrated/automated version of this with far less urban real estate + labour costs will bring the prices down significantly. I have a feeling only smaller luxury/farmers market/vegetable+fruit+meat only (+ semi-automated pantry section) shops will exist in the future. You don't really need to pick up most stuff by hand, but an in-person browsing UX can still be useful. Ikea stores are halfway to figuring this out.

mrfusion 6y ago

What about the idea that we should build up herd immunity in the summer so we’re not dealing with corona and flu in the fall? I guess we’d want healthy people to be out together if so. I heard that somewhere. Not sure if it makes sense.

vkou 6y ago
> What about the idea that we should build up herd immunity in the summer so we’re not dealing with corona and flu in the fall? Nobody currently knows whether or not getting COVID-19 makes you immune to getting it again.
- mrfusion 6y ago
  Do you have a source? I can’t think of any other virus that works like that (except hiv which attacks the immune system)
  - barry-cotter 6y ago
    https://twitter.com/statesdj/status/1252698777296797698?s=21 https://twitter.com/statesdj/status/1252698777296797698?s=21 > If you’re hoping a vaccine is going to be a knight in shining armor saving the day, you may be in for a disappointment. SARSCOV2 is a highly contagious virus. A vaccine will need to induce durable high level immunity, but coronaviruses often don’t induce that kind of immunity 1/ > There’s a nice preprint just out on antibody responses to SARSCOV2. Lots of people don’t develop much of an IgM response and the IgG response fades noticeably after just two months https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2020.04.15.20066407v1.full.pdf https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2020.04.15.20066407v... 2/ This is consistent with the other human coronaviruses. They induce an immune response, but it tends to fade so the same virus can reinfect us a year or two later. https://t.co/MFQyjhZF0T?amp=1 https://t.co/MFQyjhZF0T?amp=1 3/ The experience with veterinary vaccines for coronaviruses is also not great. There are economically important coronaviruses infecting farm animals and we’ve been trying to develop good vaccines for decades. Most on these vaccines are putzy https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7138383/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7138383/ 4/ The thread’s longer but the prognosis is not good.

wolco 6y ago

They do this in some places. But still allow in customers. Checking tempature seems like a good way to avoid spreading other illnesses. Win-win.

CaptainZapp 6y ago

> Grocery stores could provide safer working conditions by checking temps of employees before entering the store and providing masks and gloves for all workers Checking temperatures is pretty much useless, when you can be totally asymptomatic, while spreading the virus for days. That's the big difference (and difficulty) as compared to the first version of SARS, where symptoms appeared virtually instantly after infection.

creato 6y ago
> Checking temperatures is pretty much useless, when you can be totally asymptomatic, while spreading the virus for days. It may not be 100% effective but it would surely help, possibly significantly. If we eliminated all but asymptomatic spread, how would that affect the reproduction rate?
standardUser 6y ago
It helps on the margins, just like masks and hand-washing. The more low-impact methods we can implement to reduce the transmission rate, the fewer high-impact methods are necessary.

Aloha 6y ago

Online grocery shopping takes me twice as long, and I lose out on the discoverability of a physical store.

baby 6y ago
We used to do it but we stopped because they don’t know how to pick fruits and vegetables, and they never know what a turnip is.