Even the most basic math on this indicates the Amazon option is far better for eradication of the pandemic than the Walmart option.
And the "call for closure" bit is a bit spun; it's mostly gamesmanship. The unions don't actually want their workplace closed, they're trying to point out the risk the workers are taking being there and advocating, ultimately, for things like hazard pay and PPE.
My area is limiting store hours. Umm that puts more people in the store at once, sillies.
Is Best Buy essential? No? What if my laptop breaks and I relied on it to work remotely?
Are electricians or climate control technicians essential? What if the air conditioning breaks in the middle of a texas summer? How can I self-isolate when it's even hotter inside than outside? What about elderly people who could easily have a heat stroke?
Are psychologists essential workers? They might be even more essential now that so many people are facing complete isolation and job loss.
For a week or two sure essential is very narrow, but after several weeks that can expand.
I will say though, my state at least deemed most of the roles you mentioned essential. I can still get my computer repaired, get construction/maintenance done, and at least consult with my medical professionals over the phone/video chat for now in terms of basic consultation. I know betterhelp.com is a service (there are others) my spouse has used.
Everyone who can should be ordering groceries.. I have been ordering groceries from walmart for the last month and it's great that I don't have to go in there. One time I had to do a pickup at the store (alcohol purchase..), it was very simple as well. But while I was there, I was appalled to see a walmart sized parking lot almost full of people going into the store...
What I've noticed is that delivery slots—at least for the San Diego area—are released once a day around 10pm-midnight, and sell out in about 10-20 minutes. So if you are obsessively checking manually every 10min around this time of the day, you are still relatively likely to find one.
Pickup/delivery options are a total failure across the board at all grocery stores right now. They're all generally a week out, or you just can't get any delivery slot at all.
IMHO the grocery stores should be prioritizing staff to filling delivery orders, then pickup. If they have any staff left over after that they can operate cash registers. Right now there's a perverse incentive for everyone to pack into grocery stores because there's no other option for actually getting food in a reasonable timeframe.
Ocado at least are treating regular customers well - guaranteed weekly slots etc.
But rather than rejigging deliveries - perhaps drafting in more vans for delivery of non-frozen/coop stuff, and jiggling delivery routes to do neighbouring properties together (say increase delivery slots from hourly to daily to make drops more efficent), they’ve just carried on as normal.
Instacart? INSTANT order assignment and food within 2 hours. I was stunned. Also no item limit like in Prime Now. I got 8 cheeseless pizzas. '<'
Canned response (understandably) from support which just asked us to "re-schedule it to another day" (which was at that point a week out min), and then after 2 weeks I got a cancelation email and they finally issued the $500 refund. We pay the "premium" yearly price to InstaCart, too. =|
We now have no faith in them, because if we schedule a delivery for a week away and then the food doesn't arrive we're kind of stuck; PostMates has been decent, depending on the driver you get, and has continued to be same-day.
We shouldn't be incentivizing the population to pack into a single building because we're fetishizing the ritual of going to the checkout line. The checkout line should be lowest priority for staffing.
Absolutely. An employee taking orders on the phone instead of working the cash register is an employee who's not getting exposed to coronavirus.
I can't believe we're talking about unemployment going to the moon and at the same time saying we can't spare precious labor resources. Talking grocery orders over the phone is something anyone with a grade school education can do.
As a shopper who knows what I want and where to get it, I might spend 15 minutes shopping at a minute at the register, and that doesn't count my drive to and from the store.
With respect to unemployment, nobody is interestested in working at a super-market, especially when unemployment is pays 50% more [1]. Workers would quit if it did not disqualify them from unemployment
[1] the average cashier salary is 30k/year (575/week) and the current unemployment benefit for the same salary is 875/ week when you include the additional $600
https://www.salary.com/research/salary/benchmark/cashier-gro...
So here when you order online, you don't get to choose items: you can only buy one standard list of products.
Also,I believe it's possible to build a covid-19 safe ,pickup process.
So scaling just the basics shouldnt be a problem.
And as for the rest of the products, well waiting a week isn't the end of the world.
It's not at any reasonable cost for any stressing concept of “safe”, but any reasonable pickup process is probably going to be less of a public health risk than in-store shopping even with reasonable effort at maintaining social distancing and personal protection.
At this point, everyone should have accumulated a two week buffer of food and water. A week of foresight isn't a terribly onerous ask.
That's inconvenient, but I've known for over a week that it now needs to be scheduled a week in advance, and I had all the information to determine approximately what I'd need in one week's time (how much we have now and how much we eat), so, if you can get a spot one week out, it's only a minor failure.
If you try to order grocery pickup/delivery the day you run out of food, yes, it's a big problem, but the information that you have to plan at least a week ahead is widespread enough that it's an inconvenience, not a disaster.
For weeks now, I've seen, "We're sorry! All times are currently booked. Please continue checking back - new time slots open up throughout the day."
Despite planning ahead, subscribing to the delivery service, and attempting to schedule a delivery or pickup, I get this unhelpful message and have been forced to shop in the store two times.
Why can't they just queue my order with an expected delivery date like Amazon? I'm fine waiting a week to three weeks as long as I don't have to keep polling their delivery slots every hour, on the hour, just to figure out that they don't have any available.
By the way, I'm not complaining. I understand the system is overwhelmed and operating outside the expected capacity. I'm just frustrated with people looking upon those shopping in-store as if it has anything to do with lack of foresight.
Because grocery delivery in normal times is more time-of-day sensitive and more subject to “if not at the desired time, I will not want it or get it by a different means” than general merchandise, and so grocery delivery systems are optimized around those conditions.
Now, obviously, with a mass shelter-in-place order, “as soon as possible, and I'll be here and ready to accept and store it whatever time of day that turns out to be” is a lot more common for groceries than it normally would be, but no one built their systems around a maybe once a century public health event.
So what? Then get your week out slot. Then when you get your order next week, reserve a slot for a week out. I have to wait 2-3 days here, so I've adjusted and planning on that.
If there are no slots at all, sure that's a problem. But claiming it's a failure across the board because you have to wait a few days to a week is kind of insane...
That's just it, this last 4 weeks when I've tried to order online, about 75% of the time I've seen no slots at all, from 3 or 4 different providers.
While we've had to do a couple in person runs to try to hit the limited stock items tp, paper towels, and—when the problems actually included hoarding early on rather than just the supply-chain issues later—milk, we've had pretty good luck with instacart except during the first week of the CA shelter-in-place order.
OTOH, I know people less than 100 miles away that are having very different experiences.
I suspect this is all highly variable from place to place and week to week.
> IMHO the grocery stores should be prioritizing staff to filling delivery orders, then pickup.
Where it's even entirely within the same company, staff aren't entirely fungible between delivery and other functions. And where it's not, that's even more true.