Walmart Grocery is now offering a $98 per year ‘Delivery Unlimited’ subscription

Curation has value, but not here. I shop walmart because they have everything. Costco has a far more limited shopping list, because there's tons of stuff they just don't have.

Same for Aldi and Trader Joes, they are great for what they have, but it's not enough for my complete grocery needs.

I wonder if the Zip lock bags, plastic warp, and things like aluminum foil are different than grocery stores. Warehouse quality.

Don't you have to subscribe to Costco in the first place? Or is Costco letting just anyone shop there now? It's been a lot of years since I let my Costco subscription ("membership") lapse.

Regardless I agree with your hope that retail looks more like Costco than Amazon.

Particularly since those are the kind of products you can hardly research due to lack of reviews, which aren't paid affiliate promotions, I think storefronts like Amazon should step up, curate and limit their selection to worthwhile products.

Also, Costco liquors are high quality relative to their prices.

The "Super Wal-Mart" we have now is pretty boring, makes you walk across that entire giant store to get a quart of oil and a bag of chips, and then lets you choose between "Self-Checkout" or a really long line at the one or two cash registers they have open.

In places where an Aldi's has opened up they've put a serious dent in those Super Wal-Marts, and Costco just blows them away. Wal-Mart will have to do a lot more very soon to maintain same store sales numbers as those two competitors fill in the gaps.

Culturally, though, Walmart has absolutely no chance. I recently purchased my first online order through Walmart as they had a product no one else in the country had. It came busted and spilled out in the bag. I emailed just to make them aware that this happened and the hostile, "PROVE IT" type response I got was so incredible compared to Amazon's facilitation of the customer. Walmart culturally will never have a "oh you didn't like it that's fine just stuff it in a box here's a label and a we've issued a full refund" response to anything.

Thanks for that thought. It made me look at the whole Amazon/Wal-Mart thing the other way around.

With all of Amazon's new standalone bookstores and miniature grocery stores, it can be seen that Amazon is playing catching up to Wal-Mart.

Honestly, I'm OK with both. Amazon for things like underpants, cat litter, and other stuff that isn't likely to be counterfeit. Wal-Mart for things that matter, like food, HABA, and the occasional last-minute flash card.

Nokia and RIM were the biggest players in phone market in terms of revenue once, just because you are leader now does not mean you will be a leader in the future.

For variety you go for Amazon or Walmart. For simplicity and confidence, Costco.

To be clear, this is a reply to: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20198779

I think if HN is going to separate my reply from its parent, they should explain why. This reply makes more sense with context.

And I don't use Target's online shopping because it's freaking useless. Sandwich bread? Sorry, not available for pick-up in the stores near me. Sugar? Same story. Flour? Nope. What's the point of all those signs in Target's grocery section telling me I can order my food online?

I miss Peapod. :(

I tried Prime Now, Peapod, and Freshdirect so far. FD is the most reliably good, but there's no same-day delivery, and it's the most expensive. Peapod also has no same-day, often misses items, and isn't That much cheaper.

Prime Now has the same-day, but so far, on three occasions, they've delivered subpar produce I'd never have picked myself, super stale bread, and damaged-during-delivery produce, for only slightly less than the cost of freshdirect. I like same-day delivery of goods, but not same-day delivery of bads.

Corporate has been trying to fix the issue for years with different technology. They bought into RFID tech pretty heavily but it didn't really work as advertised. It seems the plan was to interrogate tags as they come off the truck since they had readers on both sides of the loading dock. Even with my limited experience with RFIDs I can see that not working. Passive RFIDs are only reliable when you have line of sight. Active and semi-passive tags work far better but they're way more expensive. When unloading the truck you need to deal with box orientation, un-loader's watery bodies, and equipment. Now the readers look abandoned and in disrepair.

Later they re-purposed the Layaway system to assign cases/items to locations in the back room. It was an amazing idea but it's fundamentally flawed in a few ways.

  1. Adding and removing items is too slow and unreliable. The portable terminals lose connection or take seconds to process scans. Those seconds add up when scanning hundreds of boxes. 
  2. Each item/case requires a label that takes time to print
  3. Large quantities of unsold special items can fill precious backroom space. This requires hunting for holes to add new, normal items. 
  4. Lack of time results in corners being cut. Items are not scanned or they fall behind stacks of other boxes and are lost. 

What I would like to see is a store where all merchandise is kept in the stockroom. Customers scan bar-codes on the shelf or on displays. A team in the back picks the items from inventory and meets the customer at the door after payment is made. Of course that would require a major change to story layouts, staffing, and customer expectations so I doubt it will ever happen.

Edit: spelling errors