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Walmart is piloting a pricier 2-hour ‘express’ grocery delivery service
- taway555 7y agoIt makes sense. Just like "economy" vs "first class" for travel. As a business, it needs to partition out the consumer buckets into various groups for profit maximization.
- Spivak 7y ago"Pay less if it's not urgent" doesn't sound evil or anything. Like the pandemic has proved that delivery workers are a scarce resource, what do you want them to do, have a raffle?
- vkou 7y agoThere's three broad ways to determine distribution of scarce goods. You've missed one. In no particular order, those ways are: 1. Highest bidder. 2. Lottery. 3. Highest need. There is no intrinsic 'fairness' to either of those three priorities to distribution - what any person thinks is the fairest method completely depends on their value system. However, regardless of your value system, and your opinion on which of these is the most fair, you can probably agree that for luxury goods, #1 is a reasonably accurate proxy for #3... And that for life-necessary staples, it is not. In the case of grocery delivery in the middle of a pandemic, people with pre-existing conditions, the elderly, and people living adjacent to those first two groups rank much higher on #3, than your run-of-the-mill 20-something-year-old. For the former, delivery is not a luxury good. For the latter, it is.
- renewiltord 7y agoIf they are truly life-necessary. But it is quite likely that the elderly and the pre-existing conditions folk will survive getting the bread tomorrow instead of in two hours. We already have a bypass mechanisms for the "I'll die if I don't get it in two hours". It's the emergency services system and it's there when your life is in danger and it's currently overprovisioned to ensure capacity.
- vkou 7y agoWhich is why I was talking about grocery delivery as a whole, as opposed to two-hour grocery delivery. The problem is if the express versus economy stratification does not actually increase overall system throughput - but instead, attracts more load to the system, as people who don't need it, but were otherwise going to the store end up using it for convenience.
- scollet 7y agoIt sounds like it's actually "pay more if it is urgent".
- downerending 7y agoIn a competitive market, it really will be "pay less if it's not urgent". In particular, if you're a peon flying coach, you want some people flying first class, because they are effectively subsidizing your ticket. Bring on the rich!
- bluGill 7y agoThe ecconmics of airplanes is different and do not apply. Here you want enough people paying for the cheap service that it makes money so they don't kill it. There is no advantage to a class of service that doesn't pay for itself in this space, you just move up to the next one. Actually the worst thing would be most people choosing this as they may decide that the cheaper class isn't worth serving at all.
- downerending 7y agoI don't think this analysis is correct. No one's going to offer a service if it's cheaper not to, yes. But if there's only one class of service, you have to make $X on each order to cover your fixed costs. If there are multiple classes, the cheapest class could end up being $(0.8X) and still allow you to make more money overall.
- bluGill 7y agoIn an airplane the (.8x) works out because the seats are going anyway. I don't see how that works for Walmart where they can not do the delivery.
- aarong11 7y agoThink of it as an SLA. People optimise for different outcomes, some people need their groceries in a 1 hour timeslot because they have other commitments.
- reaperducer 7y agoAs a business, it needs to partition out the consumer buckets into various groups for profit maximization. When you're stuck with an empty cardboard roll in the middle of a three-flusher, you'll pay whatever price Wal-Mart asks.
- Zhenya 7y agoShowers work...
- makerofspoons 7y agoAs a customer I would rather they solve the problem that their pickers decrease the usability of their stores.
- lostapathy 7y agoI had a good laugh yesterday at their store. They have finally put one-way stickers on the floor to indicate aisle directions. The only people I saw going the wrong way were wal-mart order pickers.
- RandomBacon 7y agoSerious: Are those stickers any better? I haven't shopped at a store with those arrows, so I haven't seen how well they work, I can only guess... If someone is standing in the aisle comparing two products, are you going to wait for them so you don't pass them? If you only need one item and it's in an aisle towards the front of the store, are you going to follow the arrows so you go further towards the back of the store and down an aisle that you didn't need to go down? Are the arrows going to prevent you from walking through someone else's exhaled air? It seems more like something to appear doing good than actually doing good.
- downerending 7y ago> Are the arrows going to prevent you from walking through someone else's exhaled air? In most aisles, it's almost impossible to maintain your distance from others if people are traveling in both directions, since you're frequently passing closely. If everyone makes a one-way "circuit" around the store, you can maintain pretty large distances.
- steffan 7y agoI think the point stands - the standard 6' / 1.5m guidelines are completely arbitrary and it's likely that droplets remain suspended for some period of time, so regardless of direction, you're certain to encounter potential infectious agents if you're in an aisle within 15-30+ minutes of someone contagious passing through.
- octernion 7y agohah, not only are they copying Instacart's business model, they also copied the naming (https://www.instacart.com/store/express https://www.instacart.com/store/express)
- dx87 7y agoNot sure how this is going to work, even the standard service is completely booked until next week at my local Walmart, unless they'll reserve some drivers for the 2-hour service.
- jdc 7y agoIt seems to me that they will use some of the extra money to pay more drivers.
- exhilaration 7y agoYou can't blame Walmart for that, that's case everywhere, from local supermarkets to Whole Foods delivery. All deliveries are out at least a week due to everyone avoiding going out because of covid.
- cactus2093 7y agoIn the Bay Area Instacart has been the best option in my experience. A few weeks ago Amazon Fresh and most other services I checked were impossible to get, but on Instacart you could still get a spot 3 days out if you booked it before about noon. Now it seems better across the board, still spotty on other services but on Instacart you can reliably get any time slot you want the next day and even usually same-day.
- dx87 7y agoI'm not blaming them, I just legitimately don't see how they could offer another service when they're already booked solid and don't have any drivers to spare.
- wincy 7y agoWalmart near me uses DoorDash to deliver orders. Maybe they’re planning on ratcheting that up?
- bachmeier 7y ago26 million workers have lost their jobs in a little more than a month. The labor market might well be worse than the Great Depression. It doesn't seem to be a hard problem to solve.
- battery_cowboy 7y agoYet another way a huge corp is using this pandemic to make more profit. Now, some elderly person, cancer patient, etc won't be able to get a delivery slot because they cannot afford the premium for the faster service, and this will take resources from the cheaper delivery choice. Edit: spare me from your acrobatics that make this sound like a fair move by such a wholesome company. I'm sorry if I don't bend over for the company that tells employees to go on food stamps instead of paying a fair wage.
- hombre_fatal 7y agoIf it's so lucrative why isn't there an UberEats for groceries (if there isn't one) and why can't these people just use those services? imo saying they're using the pandemic for profit by giving you an option to not have to wait 2 weeks is like saying the drivers of these services are just taking advantage of the pandemic. It becomes pretty meaningless.
- mey 7y agoInstacart is probably the closest, but like UberEats they require the grocery store to be integrated.
- Jarwain 7y agoInstacart would be the "UberEats for Groceries", and already has issues with running out of time slots.
- rstupek 7y agoShipt is a grocery delivery service as well. Been using them for years
- Spivak 7y agoYou're talking about a pretty narrow window for someone who can afford an $8 delivery service but not an $18 delivery service on a grocery bill that's probably $100+. Like I get that this is essentially a fast-pass for grocery delivery but $18 for the time and labor for a real person to shop and deliver to me is a steal.
- nojito 7y agoIt’s almost always better to use your local grocery store. You get your products quicker and have a greater selection as well.
- cableshaft 7y agoI assume you mean local as in not large corporations like Walmart or Meijer or Target or Jewel. Because those are local for people also. And that may be true most of the time, but not during this pandemic, if you want to stay home to protect yourself. None of those places have delivery, at least not that I know of, so I would have to go there to shop. I'm not even sure if they have Curbside pickup options.
- reaperducer 7y agoI'm not even sure if they have Curbside pickup options. One of the local chains where I live just added curbside this week — seven (eight? nine?) weeks into this.
- nojito 7y agoAll the medium grocers in my area offer curbside pickup now. The larger ones have had home delivery for a fee.
- reaperducer 7y agoIt’s almost always better to use your local grocery store. For a vast number (possibly a majority) of Americans, Walmart is their local grocery store.
- nojito 7y agoNot based on population density.
- opencl 7y agoMy local grocery store has a much smaller selection than Walmart for seemingly everything other than meat and cheese. Not surprising when the store is 1/10 the size. But they were way ahead of the curve on grocery delivery, they've been doing it decades.
- freepor 7y agoAlso a way around price gouging laws. Many vendors cannot raise wages to attract more couriers since they are legally barred from raising prices. So they position this as a new service.
- michaelmrose 7y agoCurbside pickup is about as safe and easier to scale. It's trivial to repurpose any employee as an order picker with 5 minutes training.
- xyzzy_plugh 7y agoHow is it about as safe? What if I don't have a car? Delivery seems MUCH safer -- I don't have to leave my home at all.
- nightfly 7y agoThere is no effective difference in the safety of delivery vs curb side pickup.
- NullPrefix 7y agoFor car users, that is.
- cheeze 7y agoDriving is by far the most dangerous thing that folks do on a regular basis. If I get delivery I don't drive, but I am offloading that risk to someone else. Either way, I disagree.
- michaelmrose 7y agoIt is AS safe insofar as risk of infection. The risk of driving to the grocery store is pretty low if you are at not to much below average in your driving skills and not drunk. Current stats are I believe 1.25 deaths per 100 million vehicle miles in the US. Someone came up with a great metric to compare risk called "micromorts" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Micromort https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Micromort Defined as a 1 in a million chance of death per unit of exposure. All causes in the US give an average of 22 per day in the US in 2010. Traveling 5 miles by car is 0.02 micromorts. Climbing Everest is aprox 38k mm if you are average competence for people who normally do such a thing. To get the risk profile of going out you would have to get the all cause probability of dying from everything else other than driving and add the chance of dying on a given trip but 0.02 is probably fairly reasonable. Infectious disease is particularly interesting because its unreasonable to assign a simple probability of infection and then probability of death because if people in aggregate opt to collectively take more risks they each may indeed face only a small initial chance of mortality but their collective choices can going forward spread the virus around and greatly increase their chances of infection in future expeditions. This is what people who want to assess the risks for themselves usually fail to get. They aren't allowed to do it because they are extremely likely to be bad at it and their risks effect others futures.
- ngngngng 7y agoI would love use a Walmart grocery delivery service, but they use a 9 mile radius around their stores to qualify for delivery and I'm 10 miles away from the nearest store.
- reaperducer 7y agoKeep trying. I wasn't part of the Wal-Mart delivery area until last week. They seem to be expanding lately.
- kristopolous 7y agousing clayton christensen, what's in the downmarket forcing them to retreat upmarket?
- petra 7y agoThey're not retreating. It's an additional service.
- analog31 7y agoJust a thought, make it optional to get rid of the scheduled pickup time. I would be happy with an expected average waiting time, and have them text me when it's ready. Many of us, myself included, are working from home and have totally flexible schedules. I wouldn't mind just dropping everything and heading over to the store.
- blackrock 7y agoThis seems interesting, but I highly doubt Walmart can make it work. Everything about the company screams crap. Every time I go to a Walmart store, I feel as if I lose several IQ points. I have stopped going there. Their only saving grace, is that I don’t trust Amazon to buy certain things, which means I’d rather buy it from a physical store. But I’d still choose any other company, than Walmart. But, if they can offer decent delivery, with the option to return stuff, then I might try them out. I dislike returning stuff at Walmart.