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Comment by mullingitover | Hacker News Reader

> Well, at least by me you can order groceries from walmart to have them delivered/picked up.

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.

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In the UK the supermarkets have massively failed to scale their delivery services.

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.

Ocado would love deliver more groceries but the bottleneck in the delivery system isn't related to vans or routing

> 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.

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.

No, it's not just about ordering grocery pickup/delivery the day you run out of food. The big problem is that there is no queue!

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.

> Why can't they just queue my order with an expected delivery date like Amazon?

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.

Delivery and curbside pickup require more employees than the traditional method of customers picking their groceries from the shelves. The grocery stores simply don't have enough employees to serve all their customers if they only do delivery and curbside pickup.

I understand, which is why I'm advocating closing down the cash registers to shunt staff into serving delivery and pickup orders.

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.

Shutting down registers and making the handful of regular checkers do delivery/pickup orders isn't tenable - the throughput isn't even close to similar. Putting together pickup/deliveries is very time consuming for traditional grocers. And then what happens when someone who doesn't have the ability to shop via app needs groceries? Do they call in, and take up another employee's bandwidth while they take down the list?

> And then what happens when someone who doesn't have the ability to shop via app needs groceries? Do they call in, and take up another employee's bandwidth while they take down the list?

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.

It seems like you are assuming supermarkets can support the same number of customers if the reallocated their staff to pickup/delivery.

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...

https://www.edd.ca.gov/unemployment/ui-calculator.htm

We have the same problem in Israel.

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.

> Also,I believe it's possible to build a covid-19 safe ,pickup process.

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.

> Pickup/delivery options are a total failure across the board at all grocery stores right now.

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.

For me, Prime Now's been dead for days.

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. '<'

Opposite experience here. We placed an order on a Sunday, next available delivery date was the following Thursday. We received hourly updates on Thursday, that the order was "being shopped, delivery delayed +1hr" -- Thursday came & went, on Friday we received no updates, and the order just sat there for a week or so.

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.

Instacart is dead for me. "We'll be with you shortly. We're taking a lot of orders right now, we'll be back soon!" -> Click 'Try again' -> loops back to that message.

Instacart has no item limits but they also don't either provide order-time notice of or have any exemption from the item limits imposed by the actual retailers.

Yeah, it's a mystery to me why this is so hard. Put a barcode on all receipts "order this again". Go online, scan in your barcode to place the order, bam problem solved. For 90% of people this would satisfy all the normal grocery shopping since we tend to just buy the same staples over and over. As for the rest, well, yes there would need to be a small army of staff to deal with corner cases. But why this is unobtainium is beyond me.

Sounds like you are trying to make ordering easier. Current problem seems to be that the stores are swamped and can't handle the order volume. At least here in the UK where I live, the grocery stores are asking people who can to buy in person, instead of online ordering.

>They're all generally a week out

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...

> If there are no slots at all, sure that's a problem

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.

My wife and I have placed three InstaCart orders in the last month. Super fast, and excellent, service. We have been giving the shoppers a little over 20% of the total order cost as a cash tip, on top of what InstaCart pays them. The shoppers seemed to be happy to have the work.

> They're all generally a week out

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.

I think most people had that, and it's been over two weeks now.

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