Comment by randallsquared | Hacker News Reader

Comment by randallsquared | Hacker News Reader

Haha. I moved to NYC this year. I used Instacart for months, because I'd have to sign up for another service to use something else, and they mostly seemed equivalent, and I may even have had some YC-brand-loyalty, even though I was quite unhappy at times with Instacart.

Instacart will often allow me to order more of something than is in stock, because they have no real concept of "in stock". For any order of more than 5-6 types of items, chances a very good that something will be missing, so you can't rely on them for tonight's dinner -- instead, you have to order the night before so that you have time to stop by the store yourself on the way home from work the night you want to make the meal requiring all of those ingredients, to get the thing(s) they allowed you to select but "couldn't find".

I have placed orders through Instacart which didn't happen at all because they "couldn't find" anything in the order and it was all do-not-replace.

I have placed an order through Instacart mid-day which was shopped, and then delayed until my SO finally called them, whereupon she was told it would be the next morning, but not to worry, everything had already been shopped, and had been put in temperature controlled holding! But then the next day most of the order was refunded before a few things were delivered, because the shopper "couldn't find them".

Instacart will commonly put frozen food, bags of chips, dish soap, and 2L sodas in the same bag together, and then roll the dice on whether things are crushed, too warm, or otherwise came to ruin.

I may have a lot of anger built up at Instacart.

Although I've also become increasingly disgruntled with Amazon, at least I was already signed up with Prime, so I decided a couple weeks ago to try PrimeNow. I don't think I've used Instacart since.

I cannot stress how different the experience was:

When ordering from Amazon (not the individual grocers), PrimeNow wouldn't let me order more 2L sodas of my usual brand/flavor than were in stock.

When I ordered something crushable, it was in a separate bag, and uncrushed.

When I ordered something frozen, they put an icepack in with it.

Instacart slashing prices is laughable. Price is not their main problem. I would gladly pay twice as much, if only I could count on them, but as it is, it's possible now that I'll never again use Instacart.

My wife and I live in Minneapolis and our experience over the past 2 years has been basically the same as yours, expect with the companies reversed.

Instacart has been generally top notch in their logistics and customer service. Small issues now and then, but rectified quickly and pro-actively.

Amazon PrimeNow and their Amazon restaurant delivery has been a total mess. Cancelled orders hours after placing them, unexplained delivery glitches where a courier attempts a delivery and leaves with all the merchandise if we don't answer the door knock immediately, etc.

I'm not shy in letting customer service know when there are problems and even the refund process is a mess - we've had charges refunded 3, 4, 5 times (like I spend $100 and they end up refunding me $300 dollars!). Tried to explain to Amazon and get in to crazy unintelligible email threads with offshore service centers.

Finally just gave up on the whole thing with them. Will try again in a couple years and see if things have improved.

I'm glad you two posted your experiences and it's really useful seeing them side by side.

It speaks to how difficult logistics like this truly is and how difficult it is to not only scale the service but scale the quality consistently across very different geographic regions working with very different grocers, etc.

This was my experience with PrimeNow as well. I gave up using them after the second time they delivered one week past the sell by date for a gallon of milk.

Was completely turned off and never went back.

Did Instacart for a while, but Shipt (Target) entered our market and I’ve been really happy with them.

> Instacart will often allow me to order more of something than is in stock

The dirty little secret of grocery delivery is that most grocers don't have an inventory system that tells them how many units of each item are on hand.

Most grocers physically count their inventory once a month or once a quarter, and they don't keep a running balance as products are received and sold.

That means they can't tell Instacart how much of each item is on hand, and they can't remove items from Instacart when they sell out.

So you can easily have a 15% to 20% no-fill rate on online orders, especially on lower volume items that don't have as much visibility or stock on hand.

Chain grocery stores, at least, must have a running total in their internal systems. They know how much product was delivered from the supplier. They know how much product has been sold (at least for countable items).

It does seem plausible that they do not have an API for Instacart to interface with, though.

A 20% no-fill rate (which seems about right in my experience in NYC) is far too high for most use cases, and so either they'll have to figure out something to get accurate counts, or it's a forced win for someone with an integrated warehouse.

I work on exactly this problem, it is actually pretty complicated. A grocery store does know how much is delivered but it does not know how much is in stock. A simplified version is like this. 20 boxes of cheerios come in, there are room for 5 on the shelf, there are room for 5 on top of the shelf, then 10 go to the backroom.

Someone steals a box from the shelf, another takes a box and puts it back behind the frosted flakes. Now the inventory is showing 20 boxes, but there are only 19 in the store, and one of those 19 is somewhere hiding somewhere.

These are the easy cases. Consider shirts. A shirt can come in different sizes or colors but they all have the same upc number. We have 20 shirts according to inventory, no need to order more right? The only problem is that all the mediums and larges sold out and we only have xxls and xsms. Also items can come in packs, but are sold individually. There can be special displays, so some of the items are moved from their old location to a new location. On and on with edge cases and exceptions.

The parent comment on most stores have no idea is closer to the reality than stores know because they know what came in on the trucks.

> I work on exactly this problem

What are some potential solutions?

My solutions would go in two broad categories.

A. Worker methods.

1. Tell workers to scan (count) the inventory more often. 2. Do some gamification to actually get workers to scan more often. Not really sure about this, could easily have perverse incentives or turn it into some dystopia.

B. Non worker methods. 1. estimate inventory based on sales data and restocking data. 2. Rank the sections by profit to prioritize high profit sections.

I don't think my ideas are particularly great. Besides, nobody listens to me, I'm just a lowly programmer. I just do what they tell me ;)

You would think so but perpetual inventory is very rare, even for the large chains.

Grocery stores get less than half their assortment from their own warehouses, with the majority delivered direct to store from hundreds of vendors.

The large chains have some integration with their largest vendors like Coca Cola and Frito Lay, but usually this is just for item authorization and invoicing, not for perpetual inventory.

Spoiled and damaged product is often thrown away without recording it. Cashiers scan 12 units of one UPC instead of scanning each flavor of baby food or Gatorade separately. Scanning accuracy is even worse with self-checkout.

Reordering is typically done by looking for empty spaces on the shelf, since they don't have the perpetual inventory to do automated replenishment.

It's a real shitshow from a data quality standpoint, which is why the no-fill rate is so high with online orders.

> it's a forced win for someone with an integrated warehouse

Webvan thought so too.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Webvan

I use FreshDirect. It’s uncommon for something to be shown in stock and then be blocked as unavailable at checkout, and exceedingly rare for something to not be delivered.

My only gripe is that I’ve occasionally gotten produce that looked OK but was actually end of life, and was already turning the next day - but their refund process was entirely hassle free.

I’ve also tried peapod which, despite being a massive chain grocer, would often send a delivery with a handful of missing items. Less than 10% though.

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