9 ms·

The algorithms that make Instacart roll

100 points by mbroncano 6y ago

fblp 6y ago
This is a elegant writeup that explains how instacart works with detail that I feel like I've never seen from other companies that face similar challenges (uber, doordash). Thank you to the authors!
- an_opabinia 6y ago
  I don't know. They're losing money every day, every delivery. > DoorDash, Shipt, and Uber Eats in the United States, and Buymie, Deliveroo, and Grofers, based elsewhere They all lose money. So how do we know any of this is actually working?
  - sn_master 6y ago
    I am surprised Uber Eats is losing money given how expensive it is. Is there a source on that? Could it be due to expansion costs in new cities/countries rather than losing on per-order basis?
    - Scoundreller 6y ago
      They’re probably incredibly profitable in some places, and incredibly losing in others to kill off competition. Those promos for restaurants, couriers and consumers don’t pay for themselves.
    - disgruntledphd2 6y ago
      Uber Car still loses money, ten years after it's founding, so that doesn't surprise me at all. Also, the last mile is really, really expensive to service, as every startup in this space finds out sooner rather than later.
      - sn_master 6y ago
        I dread having to use Uber anytime I have to. The moment a competitor starts offering self-driving option for the general public, there won't be any reason to use Uber Car. A single 10 mile trip back and forth to downtown will easily cost you 100$+ without tips and 8 times out of 10 it'll be in a filthy and smelly car with a driver who doesn't care about the speed limit or the volume or genre of music he's playing in the car.
  - mytailorisrich 6y ago
    I think this can only be solved by taking humans out of the equation as much as possible in order to lower costs and boost productivity. To have one person shopping in store and then another one to deliver to your door is low productivity and almost guaranteed to cost more than most people are willing to pay for the service, unless this is in a developing country like India and China where you have both people with Western purchasing power and people that can be paid peanuts. Same for services like Deliveroo, a driver cannot make that many deliveries per hour in most locations. It has historically worked for things like pizzas because pizzas are very simple, quick, and cheap so you can have someone on minimum wage do deliveries and still be in the black but as soon as you move to things with more overhead and lower margins you hit the wall.
    - sn_master 6y ago
      How to take humans out of the equation? Use drones to make the deliveries?!
      - mytailorisrich 6y ago
        For picking it's already doable. It's possible to build automated warehouses that could pick and pack orders ready for delivery or "click and collect". Delivery is indeed the difficulty and the solution depends on the coming of age of self-driving cars (level 5). My experience of ordering online from supermarkets is that a guy drives a van around and takes your order to your front door. In suburban areas (i.e. houses not flats) we can imagine self-driving vans stopping in front of your houses and letting you collect your order like a vending machine. This is not possible now because there are no self-driving cars but the instant they become commercially available I bet this will quickly become the norm. Automated warehouses plus self-driving cars enable a fully automated process from order to delivery. I'm sure we'll get there. Drones are simpler to fly autonomously but I don't think they are practical for delivering 10s of kilos of stuff to residential areas.
        sn_master 6y ago
        Self driving will take decades before it becomes viable in developing countries. The state of driving there is very different than what the algorithms are being trained for in the US and Germany. We might have to wait until quantum computing is a thing. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x05SFt9BN0w https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x05SFt9BN0w https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mDLCd70iTeE https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mDLCd70iTeE https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3y_NiOvvALc https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3y_NiOvvALc
  - rodonn 6y ago
    This article suggests Instacart is making a small profit of $3 per order in 2020 https://www.forbes.com/sites/chloesorvino/2021/01/27/instacart-survived-covid-chaos---but-can-it-keep-delivering-after-the-pandemic/?sh=23623c23bfa1 https://www.forbes.com/sites/chloesorvino/2021/01/27/instaca...
sn_master 6y ago
Algorithms aside, I just found out that one of the victims in the Colorado shooting was an Instacart shopper. It hit me real hard thinking that the app user who made the Instacart order never knew why their order was late and may have even gotten upset and asked for a refund, not having the slightest idea about the tragedy that happened behind the scenes, or the risk to their own life had they gone shopping themselves that day instead of ordering online. "The mother of two was at the supermarket filling an Instacart order, something she did in retirement to help others, he told the newspaper." https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2021/03/23/boulder-shooting-victims-colorado-identified-eric-talley/6964265002/ https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2021/03/23/boulde...
- gigatexal 6y ago
  Yeah definitely tragic. Condolences to her family. I wish I had the answer to gun violence in America :(
  - curiousgal 6y ago
    'No Way To Prevent This,' Says Only Nation Where This Regularly Happens https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/%27No_Way_To_Prevent_This,%27_Says_Only_Nation_Where_This_Regularly_Happens https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/%27No_Way_To_Prevent_This,%2...
    - gigatexal 6y ago
      I’m not making any value or policy judgments. Anyone who understands a bit of American politics knows how hard the pro-gun lobby fights anything related to curbing gun ownership. I was merely saying that as an American it saddens me that there are all these senseless killings and that I’m not all that hopeful that real change is possible. Maybe I’m a glass half empty kind of guy I dunno.
      - zikzak 6y ago
        It's time for the adults to take care of this. I understand the deeply embedded gun culture and stockpiles. But what would you do if you found out porcelain toilets were killing people at this rate? You'd ban them and start programs to subsidize replacements. No, no, actually you'd have a significant percentage of the country insisting you can have thier toilets when you pry them from thier cold, dead hands. I sincerely wish this wasn't the way it is. The problem is generational, I guess. We need to start today by making guns a subject of ridicule among young people by using stats and studies to show there is no net benefit.
cmckn 6y ago
I don’t understand the purpose of the Item Availability Model. If you’re getting inventory updates from a store at least once a day, can’t you use a more simple approach to stock prediction than a machine learning model? I.e. they can calculate the historic sale velocity of an item and with the current stock number decide whether the item will be there when the shopper arrives? They give the example of seasonal items, but if a customer tried to order egg nog in July, wouldn’t they have inventory data that the nog hasn’t been in stock for months? Maybe I’m overestimating the fidelity or completeness of the data they receive from retailers, and I guess ML is a way to do all this math without expressing it in code.
- vasco 6y ago
  There's a great aversion to coding up any heuristic or rule system when you can learn about ML and apply it. It's more interesting, flexible and pads resumes. And sometimes it works as well or better than the rule systems, though it's rare.
- rdw 6y ago
  I asked a similar question of someone who worked on these systems at Instacart, and the answer was that story inventory is often innacurate or incomplete. The stores just haven't needed the degree of accuracy before. There's also a fun integration problem: food manufacturers essentially lease shelf space and then the manufacturer handles all the inventory/restocking, and the store itself doesn't know or care what's there. So now you have to contact a bunch of third parties to learn what's in the store.
  - slt2021 6y ago
    the store does know, or can figure out if they really wanted to. every vendor is assigned some shelf space and has some restocking day (like every morning for bread) when the shelves are expected to be 100% full. then they have purchases data from point of sale terminals/online orders. the problem becomes A minus B
    - ToFundorNot 6y ago
vector_spaces 6y ago
I do technical consulting for the grocery business. The grocery industry is a lot of fun -- lots of extremely hard technical challenges and interesting CS problems, but also lots of low hanging fruit in the way of painful manual process. Couple this with the fact that the grocery marketplace is dynamic in the extreme. Prices and availability of items in categories like produce change on a daily if not hourly cadence. And it's all about relationships, which is something nearly every startup in this space misses, which is why nearly all of them fail faster and harder than they do in other industries. You won't get far if you're thinking in terms of replacing people with APIs. Anyway, I'm excited to see what the next ten years will bring here.
- ollieglass 6y ago
  > And it's all about relationships, which is something nearly every startup in this space misses, which is why nearly all of them fail faster and harder than they do in other industries. Could you expand on this? It's not clear from the outside how this would be such a central part of the industry.
  - bruiseralmighty 6y ago
    Not the original poster, but I also work in the grocery services industry with a startup that does door-to-door grocery delivery. My guess is this person meant relationships with the farmers and producers being critical. At least this is true for us. If you want the freshest produce and other local items, then you need to know the farmers and other vendors in your area. If you want to go mass market instead, then there are only a few wholesalers to choose from.
    - gundmc 6y ago
      Not even just that, in CPG store managers typically have a lot of autonomy in what SKUs get carried, how many placements of each, what shelf locations, etc. It's not easy for a small to mid-sized brand to try to get their product into stores when each physical brick and mortar store is a pitch in and of itself. So what ends up happening is brands partner with Agencies who specialize in building relationships with each of the store managers in a region and advocating for all of the brands in their portfolio. I realize this is a step removed from Instacart and delivery services, but the whole industry tends to operate in a similar interpersonal/relationship-based way.
gigatexal 6y ago
Interesting that item availability (qty on hand?) is powered by a ML model and not a field in the DB.
- petercooper 6y ago
  Though quite an interesting solution and an appropriate one for ML, I think, given the sporadic and temporally limited nature of the availability data they receive from the stores. After all, that a store has 100 cans of soda right now doesn't mean they'll have any when my order is being picked in 2 days time.
- jeeeb 6y ago
  Another point on this - even if current inventory levels were known precisely (generally they aren’t), whether an item is currently available is not what is of interest. Rather what is of interest is whether an item will be available when an order is filled.
subpixel 6y ago
In the same way that I find Mealpal infinitely more satisfying than any food delivery, I am over the moon about shopping for groceries online and picking them up in person. The interaction with the business I am paying is valuable to me. I can - and do - give direct feedback about the service, which improves it. And if I forgot something, I can also run into the store and grab it, COVID circumstances permitting. The _same guy_ puts groceries in my car every time. A guy with a job that has health insurance. That matters.
- persedes 6y ago
  can't highlight this enough. We've tried instacart when the pandemic started, but ended up with our stores express lane service. The online order works pretty well and the grocery shoppers are less likely (by a lot) to forget something and are pretty good at replacing out of stock items. With instacart, it always felt like babystitting the shopper. And lastly yes, it helps, that I feel like the ones with the job are less exploited than the IC shoppers....
paulcole 6y ago
Neat content but the “secret sauce” is really the willingness/ability to take advantages of the employees they call contractors. Throughout human history exploiting people has been one of the most effective business models imaginable and yet somehow Instacart (and others) have figured out a way to lose absolutely astounding amounts of money doing it.
jfengel 6y ago
Where are they getting "petabytes" of daily data from? Even if you took every single transaction anywhere near the industry, in all its details, and represented it in a verbose format like JSON or XML, that's still only kilobytes of data times billions of transactions = terabytes. If they were gathering tons of video, maybe. Or vast numbers of high-precision sensors generating data continuously. But I didn't see anything like that. It's just hard for any human activity to generate that much data. Is "petabytes" just some kind of hype, or is there something I'm missing?
- YoungWeb 6y ago
  To me it seems to be more of a volume data point rather than storage. So, it might only be terabytes of data, but for instance in ML algorithms, you could be running that data through the algorithm many times every two minutes. So by the end of the day, you've processed "petabytes" of data. This is just my interpretation of it. I could be wrong to.
- TrainedMonkey 6y ago
  Maybe data streams collected from phones of people ordering groceries and buyers going to stores could add up to petabytes.
- sn_master 6y ago
  A lot of big data datasets are de-normalized to make queries faster. Joining is very expensive. Source: Worked in big datasets at Bing for a couple years.
- hnpobdo 6y ago
  1 user searches for a product, and then clicks on 1: although you estimate this transaction generates 1kb of data, in fact this is more on the order of 1kb x the number of candidates, so a few MB.
iandanforth 6y ago
Let's talk about the hard problem here. Control and Flexibility. I'm a regular Instacart user and I don't think I've ever had a perfect order. There's always something wrong in terms of size, quality, or availability. Most of the time it's no big deal but it begs the question, can these problems be eliminated? Take the perspective of a 3 star chef. You've got two major strategies to work with 1. Control and 2. Flexibility. The control strategy means you have deep trust in reliable suppliers. You've spent years finding the people who can get you what you need when you need it. You build your menu in consultation with your suppliers and then you check, check, and recheck every single order to make sure the standard doesn't slip. It's incredibly hard. The flexible strategy means that you adapt your menu daily or nearly daily to the supply you select yourself. Your talent is taking what is available, finding the best, and creating surprise and delight in a clientele who like that kind of thing. This is also incredibly hard. Basically nowhere in the high-quality-fresh-food world can you 100% rely on supply. And that's the challenge that Instacart faces. It doesn't have any strong relationships with suppliers (it's all third party or arms-reach) and it has almost no ability to be flexible because the orders are set by people who are hard to reach and haven't explained their needs. There's some light in this tunnel. For example plantoeat.com (recipe and meal planning service) now integrates with instacart, but it doesn't work well at all. Even when it does populate the cart shoppers don't know the recipe associated with what they are buying and aren't incentivized to care. Throwing layers of ML on top of unpredictable systems isn't a terrible idea, but it's a bandaid. The problems as I've described above are 1. Lack of control and 2. An inability to be flexible because you don't understand the needs you're fulfilling. The best answer to this is vertical integration. Goodeggs.com is one vertically integrated grocery delivery service. You could also think of it as a net-first grocery store, ghost grocer, whatever. When I buy from them I'm much more likely to get what I ask for. And in the cases where I am ordering a meal kit and they are out of some component, they know what can and cannot be substituted to fulfill the requirements of the recipe. I don't think Instacart is going anywhere, it does what it does pretty well and I think it will keep getting better. But Amazon was right to buy Whole Foods and until Instacart owns the entirety of the production and distribution chain they won't get to the kind of experience people have been used to when they plan a meal, visit a store, and select for themselves.
29athrowaway 6y ago
I stopped using Instacart when they were unable to deliver an order in the time windows I selected and then unilaterally changed the time to a time when I was not going to be at home. I complained and they insisted and eventually the food was left outside for hours until it went bad. A shortsighted decision on their part. Because right after they took that stupid decision I stopped using their services forever and have told everyone I know to do the same. Plus, sometimes you want to buy one thing and add extra stuff to your cart in order to meet the minimum order value, and they do not have the one thing you were interested in on stock and you end up wasting your time. Amazon is much better at estimating stock and much more reliable. Amazon customer support is better and prioritizes long term relationships with customers over short term revenue.
- drewg123 6y ago
  I've had similar issues. I made an instacart order on Sat. night that I selected a 9a->11a Sunday AM window for. I was unexpectedly kept up until 5am due to a personal emergency, and I was unable to adjust the window later, so I was woken up by the delivery at 9a sharp. (and actually by the incessant notifications at 8a sharp). I've also often wished for a "cancel the entire order if you don't have this item" button. Especially when shopping for a specific recipe where if one ingredient is missing, the rest are useless.
fukmbas 6y ago
Kroger is coming straight for instacart with Ocado. With instacart no longer picking from stove shelves and online orders being filled by Ocado sheds, boh is way more accurate and Kroger can also provide a better service. Rip instacart

100 points by mbroncano 6y ago

fblp 6y ago

This is a elegant writeup that explains how instacart works with detail that I feel like I've never seen from other companies that face similar challenges (uber, doordash). Thank you to the authors!

an_opabinia 6y ago
I don't know. They're losing money every day, every delivery. > DoorDash, Shipt, and Uber Eats in the United States, and Buymie, Deliveroo, and Grofers, based elsewhere They all lose money. So how do we know any of this is actually working?
- sn_master 6y ago
  I am surprised Uber Eats is losing money given how expensive it is. Is there a source on that? Could it be due to expansion costs in new cities/countries rather than losing on per-order basis?
  - Scoundreller 6y ago
    They’re probably incredibly profitable in some places, and incredibly losing in others to kill off competition. Those promos for restaurants, couriers and consumers don’t pay for themselves.
  - disgruntledphd2 6y ago
    Uber Car still loses money, ten years after it's founding, so that doesn't surprise me at all. Also, the last mile is really, really expensive to service, as every startup in this space finds out sooner rather than later.
    - sn_master 6y ago
      I dread having to use Uber anytime I have to. The moment a competitor starts offering self-driving option for the general public, there won't be any reason to use Uber Car. A single 10 mile trip back and forth to downtown will easily cost you 100$+ without tips and 8 times out of 10 it'll be in a filthy and smelly car with a driver who doesn't care about the speed limit or the volume or genre of music he's playing in the car.
- mytailorisrich 6y ago
  I think this can only be solved by taking humans out of the equation as much as possible in order to lower costs and boost productivity. To have one person shopping in store and then another one to deliver to your door is low productivity and almost guaranteed to cost more than most people are willing to pay for the service, unless this is in a developing country like India and China where you have both people with Western purchasing power and people that can be paid peanuts. Same for services like Deliveroo, a driver cannot make that many deliveries per hour in most locations. It has historically worked for things like pizzas because pizzas are very simple, quick, and cheap so you can have someone on minimum wage do deliveries and still be in the black but as soon as you move to things with more overhead and lower margins you hit the wall.
  - sn_master 6y ago
    How to take humans out of the equation? Use drones to make the deliveries?!
    - mytailorisrich 6y ago
      For picking it's already doable. It's possible to build automated warehouses that could pick and pack orders ready for delivery or "click and collect". Delivery is indeed the difficulty and the solution depends on the coming of age of self-driving cars (level 5). My experience of ordering online from supermarkets is that a guy drives a van around and takes your order to your front door. In suburban areas (i.e. houses not flats) we can imagine self-driving vans stopping in front of your houses and letting you collect your order like a vending machine. This is not possible now because there are no self-driving cars but the instant they become commercially available I bet this will quickly become the norm. Automated warehouses plus self-driving cars enable a fully automated process from order to delivery. I'm sure we'll get there. Drones are simpler to fly autonomously but I don't think they are practical for delivering 10s of kilos of stuff to residential areas.
      - sn_master 6y ago
        Self driving will take decades before it becomes viable in developing countries. The state of driving there is very different than what the algorithms are being trained for in the US and Germany. We might have to wait until quantum computing is a thing. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x05SFt9BN0w https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x05SFt9BN0w https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mDLCd70iTeE https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mDLCd70iTeE https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3y_NiOvvALc https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3y_NiOvvALc
- rodonn 6y ago
  This article suggests Instacart is making a small profit of $3 per order in 2020 https://www.forbes.com/sites/chloesorvino/2021/01/27/instacart-survived-covid-chaos---but-can-it-keep-delivering-after-the-pandemic/?sh=23623c23bfa1 https://www.forbes.com/sites/chloesorvino/2021/01/27/instaca...

sn_master 6y ago

Algorithms aside, I just found out that one of the victims in the Colorado shooting was an Instacart shopper. It hit me real hard thinking that the app user who made the Instacart order never knew why their order was late and may have even gotten upset and asked for a refund, not having the slightest idea about the tragedy that happened behind the scenes, or the risk to their own life had they gone shopping themselves that day instead of ordering online. "The mother of two was at the supermarket filling an Instacart order, something she did in retirement to help others, he told the newspaper." https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2021/03/23/boulder-shooting-victims-colorado-identified-eric-talley/6964265002/ https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2021/03/23/boulde...

gigatexal 6y ago
Yeah definitely tragic. Condolences to her family. I wish I had the answer to gun violence in America :(
- curiousgal 6y ago
  'No Way To Prevent This,' Says Only Nation Where This Regularly Happens https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/%27No_Way_To_Prevent_This,%27_Says_Only_Nation_Where_This_Regularly_Happens https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/%27No_Way_To_Prevent_This,%2...
  - gigatexal 6y ago
    I’m not making any value or policy judgments. Anyone who understands a bit of American politics knows how hard the pro-gun lobby fights anything related to curbing gun ownership. I was merely saying that as an American it saddens me that there are all these senseless killings and that I’m not all that hopeful that real change is possible. Maybe I’m a glass half empty kind of guy I dunno.
    - zikzak 6y ago
      It's time for the adults to take care of this. I understand the deeply embedded gun culture and stockpiles. But what would you do if you found out porcelain toilets were killing people at this rate? You'd ban them and start programs to subsidize replacements. No, no, actually you'd have a significant percentage of the country insisting you can have thier toilets when you pry them from thier cold, dead hands. I sincerely wish this wasn't the way it is. The problem is generational, I guess. We need to start today by making guns a subject of ridicule among young people by using stats and studies to show there is no net benefit.

cmckn 6y ago

I don’t understand the purpose of the Item Availability Model. If you’re getting inventory updates from a store at least once a day, can’t you use a more simple approach to stock prediction than a machine learning model? I.e. they can calculate the historic sale velocity of an item and with the current stock number decide whether the item will be there when the shopper arrives? They give the example of seasonal items, but if a customer tried to order egg nog in July, wouldn’t they have inventory data that the nog hasn’t been in stock for months? Maybe I’m overestimating the fidelity or completeness of the data they receive from retailers, and I guess ML is a way to do all this math without expressing it in code.

vasco 6y ago
There's a great aversion to coding up any heuristic or rule system when you can learn about ML and apply it. It's more interesting, flexible and pads resumes. And sometimes it works as well or better than the rule systems, though it's rare.
rdw 6y ago
I asked a similar question of someone who worked on these systems at Instacart, and the answer was that story inventory is often innacurate or incomplete. The stores just haven't needed the degree of accuracy before. There's also a fun integration problem: food manufacturers essentially lease shelf space and then the manufacturer handles all the inventory/restocking, and the store itself doesn't know or care what's there. So now you have to contact a bunch of third parties to learn what's in the store.
- slt2021 6y ago
  the store does know, or can figure out if they really wanted to. every vendor is assigned some shelf space and has some restocking day (like every morning for bread) when the shelves are expected to be 100% full. then they have purchases data from point of sale terminals/online orders. the problem becomes A minus B
  - ToFundorNot 6y ago

vector_spaces 6y ago

I do technical consulting for the grocery business. The grocery industry is a lot of fun -- lots of extremely hard technical challenges and interesting CS problems, but also lots of low hanging fruit in the way of painful manual process. Couple this with the fact that the grocery marketplace is dynamic in the extreme. Prices and availability of items in categories like produce change on a daily if not hourly cadence. And it's all about relationships, which is something nearly every startup in this space misses, which is why nearly all of them fail faster and harder than they do in other industries. You won't get far if you're thinking in terms of replacing people with APIs. Anyway, I'm excited to see what the next ten years will bring here.

ollieglass 6y ago
> And it's all about relationships, which is something nearly every startup in this space misses, which is why nearly all of them fail faster and harder than they do in other industries. Could you expand on this? It's not clear from the outside how this would be such a central part of the industry.
- bruiseralmighty 6y ago
  Not the original poster, but I also work in the grocery services industry with a startup that does door-to-door grocery delivery. My guess is this person meant relationships with the farmers and producers being critical. At least this is true for us. If you want the freshest produce and other local items, then you need to know the farmers and other vendors in your area. If you want to go mass market instead, then there are only a few wholesalers to choose from.
  - gundmc 6y ago
    Not even just that, in CPG store managers typically have a lot of autonomy in what SKUs get carried, how many placements of each, what shelf locations, etc. It's not easy for a small to mid-sized brand to try to get their product into stores when each physical brick and mortar store is a pitch in and of itself. So what ends up happening is brands partner with Agencies who specialize in building relationships with each of the store managers in a region and advocating for all of the brands in their portfolio. I realize this is a step removed from Instacart and delivery services, but the whole industry tends to operate in a similar interpersonal/relationship-based way.

gigatexal 6y ago

Interesting that item availability (qty on hand?) is powered by a ML model and not a field in the DB.

petercooper 6y ago
Though quite an interesting solution and an appropriate one for ML, I think, given the sporadic and temporally limited nature of the availability data they receive from the stores. After all, that a store has 100 cans of soda right now doesn't mean they'll have any when my order is being picked in 2 days time.
jeeeb 6y ago
Another point on this - even if current inventory levels were known precisely (generally they aren’t), whether an item is currently available is not what is of interest. Rather what is of interest is whether an item will be available when an order is filled.

subpixel 6y ago

In the same way that I find Mealpal infinitely more satisfying than any food delivery, I am over the moon about shopping for groceries online and picking them up in person. The interaction with the business I am paying is valuable to me. I can - and do - give direct feedback about the service, which improves it. And if I forgot something, I can also run into the store and grab it, COVID circumstances permitting. The _same guy_ puts groceries in my car every time. A guy with a job that has health insurance. That matters.

persedes 6y ago
can't highlight this enough. We've tried instacart when the pandemic started, but ended up with our stores express lane service. The online order works pretty well and the grocery shoppers are less likely (by a lot) to forget something and are pretty good at replacing out of stock items. With instacart, it always felt like babystitting the shopper. And lastly yes, it helps, that I feel like the ones with the job are less exploited than the IC shoppers....

paulcole 6y ago

Neat content but the “secret sauce” is really the willingness/ability to take advantages of the employees they call contractors. Throughout human history exploiting people has been one of the most effective business models imaginable and yet somehow Instacart (and others) have figured out a way to lose absolutely astounding amounts of money doing it.

jfengel 6y ago

Where are they getting "petabytes" of daily data from? Even if you took every single transaction anywhere near the industry, in all its details, and represented it in a verbose format like JSON or XML, that's still only kilobytes of data times billions of transactions = terabytes. If they were gathering tons of video, maybe. Or vast numbers of high-precision sensors generating data continuously. But I didn't see anything like that. It's just hard for any human activity to generate that much data. Is "petabytes" just some kind of hype, or is there something I'm missing?

YoungWeb 6y ago
To me it seems to be more of a volume data point rather than storage. So, it might only be terabytes of data, but for instance in ML algorithms, you could be running that data through the algorithm many times every two minutes. So by the end of the day, you've processed "petabytes" of data. This is just my interpretation of it. I could be wrong to.
TrainedMonkey 6y ago
Maybe data streams collected from phones of people ordering groceries and buyers going to stores could add up to petabytes.
sn_master 6y ago
A lot of big data datasets are de-normalized to make queries faster. Joining is very expensive. Source: Worked in big datasets at Bing for a couple years.
hnpobdo 6y ago
1 user searches for a product, and then clicks on 1: although you estimate this transaction generates 1kb of data, in fact this is more on the order of 1kb x the number of candidates, so a few MB.

iandanforth 6y ago

Let's talk about the hard problem here. Control and Flexibility. I'm a regular Instacart user and I don't think I've ever had a perfect order. There's always something wrong in terms of size, quality, or availability. Most of the time it's no big deal but it begs the question, can these problems be eliminated? Take the perspective of a 3 star chef. You've got two major strategies to work with 1. Control and 2. Flexibility. The control strategy means you have deep trust in reliable suppliers. You've spent years finding the people who can get you what you need when you need it. You build your menu in consultation with your suppliers and then you check, check, and recheck every single order to make sure the standard doesn't slip. It's incredibly hard. The flexible strategy means that you adapt your menu daily or nearly daily to the supply you select yourself. Your talent is taking what is available, finding the best, and creating surprise and delight in a clientele who like that kind of thing. This is also incredibly hard. Basically nowhere in the high-quality-fresh-food world can you 100% rely on supply. And that's the challenge that Instacart faces. It doesn't have any strong relationships with suppliers (it's all third party or arms-reach) and it has almost no ability to be flexible because the orders are set by people who are hard to reach and haven't explained their needs. There's some light in this tunnel. For example plantoeat.com (recipe and meal planning service) now integrates with instacart, but it doesn't work well at all. Even when it does populate the cart shoppers don't know the recipe associated with what they are buying and aren't incentivized to care. Throwing layers of ML on top of unpredictable systems isn't a terrible idea, but it's a bandaid. The problems as I've described above are 1. Lack of control and 2. An inability to be flexible because you don't understand the needs you're fulfilling. The best answer to this is vertical integration. Goodeggs.com is one vertically integrated grocery delivery service. You could also think of it as a net-first grocery store, ghost grocer, whatever. When I buy from them I'm much more likely to get what I ask for. And in the cases where I am ordering a meal kit and they are out of some component, they know what can and cannot be substituted to fulfill the requirements of the recipe. I don't think Instacart is going anywhere, it does what it does pretty well and I think it will keep getting better. But Amazon was right to buy Whole Foods and until Instacart owns the entirety of the production and distribution chain they won't get to the kind of experience people have been used to when they plan a meal, visit a store, and select for themselves.

29athrowaway 6y ago

I stopped using Instacart when they were unable to deliver an order in the time windows I selected and then unilaterally changed the time to a time when I was not going to be at home. I complained and they insisted and eventually the food was left outside for hours until it went bad. A shortsighted decision on their part. Because right after they took that stupid decision I stopped using their services forever and have told everyone I know to do the same. Plus, sometimes you want to buy one thing and add extra stuff to your cart in order to meet the minimum order value, and they do not have the one thing you were interested in on stock and you end up wasting your time. Amazon is much better at estimating stock and much more reliable. Amazon customer support is better and prioritizes long term relationships with customers over short term revenue.

drewg123 6y ago
I've had similar issues. I made an instacart order on Sat. night that I selected a 9a->11a Sunday AM window for. I was unexpectedly kept up until 5am due to a personal emergency, and I was unable to adjust the window later, so I was woken up by the delivery at 9a sharp. (and actually by the incessant notifications at 8a sharp). I've also often wished for a "cancel the entire order if you don't have this item" button. Especially when shopping for a specific recipe where if one ingredient is missing, the rest are useless.

fukmbas 6y ago

Kroger is coming straight for instacart with Ocado. With instacart no longer picking from stove shelves and online orders being filled by Ocado sheds, boh is way more accurate and Kroger can also provide a better service. Rip instacart