Show HN: Get notified when grocery pickup slots are available
curb.run
curb.run
We wait in line for the ATM or the checkout or anything else because a scrabble is unfair. Using a tool like this when others almost certainly are not doesn’t really feel fair on those other people.
Having to check manually for a slot sucks, but so does waiting in line, and that’s the lowest common denominator of behavior that still counts as fair which we can all adhere to right now.
I get that the grocery companies should make the slot selection better. But laying the blame on them feels a bit like the FAQ for those padlocks that stop the airline passenger in front of you from being able to recline, where the manufacturer tried to claim we are all in this together their product is just part of a campaign for better airline seating for us all. It was no such thing: it was kind of selfish.
In any other climate I’d happily be told to quit my social justice moralism, but things seem quite serious at the moment, and I wouldn’t encourage using this tool, but maybe I’m taking it too far.
The selfish route would have been to keep this to ourselves. We talked through the ethical implications of this and decided it was better to make it easier for everyone rather than just us. If everyone uses it and is able to grocery shop less often because they feel less food stress, things are improved.
We also purposefully don't support delivery slot since we think those should be only for people who can't drive or don't have a car, and delivery is more risky health-wise for delivery workers (who may have to visit 10+ different stores in a day).
There are definitely equity issues though. We've considered adding a prompt for people to donate to World Central Kitchen while waiting for a slot, for example.
But that is exactly the issue that gorgoiler points out with the queue example. Everybody won't use your website. Even if you are wildly successful, a huge fraction of people won't use it. Therefore it is unfair. It is like a digital line-cutting tool. The unfairness is the ethical problem.
I've been researching this as part of a brainstorming effort on things like non-profit alternatives to pickup and delivery to get more folks out of stores. I also regularly talk to employees of any place I go to about behind-the-scenes stuff to understand it. Based on how each operates, the pickup people seem to be most at risk because they're:
(a) told where to be by their handhelds at any moment even if people are crowding around that area or them (sadly common)
(b) store the stuff in tight to medium spaces full of other people with similar level of exposure
(c) forced to be at a desk, use phones, or computers that all kinds of people are touching
(d) talk to more people face to face on deliveries if they're a delivery person
Way, way more risky to work pickup if any of the above applies. It might also be more risky to order through pickup if they're not doing lots of sanitation. If you're wondering about that, all you have to do is ask anyone who has worked retail how minimum wage or barely-above people follow the rules if every day is a shit day. Hint: many will care less than the customers they're serving.
All that is just for risk assessment. Far as your app, I have mixed feelings on it like the parent. What I like is that you all put time into doing something to help people do something that might reduce the spread of the virus. So, thanks for doing that. :)
Heck, I had thought about doing the same thing with it just being selectively given to immuno-compromised, older, and/or nice folks. I also have been thinking someone could do some of these online shopping ideas for more well-off folks with differentiators with that money covering cost of both physical space and IT to support more orders from the other people. Kind of like freemium.
There was never a problem with getting a slot until the recent pandemic. My wife sat there pressing F5 but it wouldn’t be enough, new slots were taken exactly when they opened.
Turns out someone had a piece of software set up new accounts, registered slots and then sell them. The store chain fixed it after a few weeks, but those are certainly interesting problems we face with online “Queuing”.
"Life isn't fair and you should expect people to avail themselves of any tools to help themselves that are not wantonly destructive to the society at large."
You have to expect the worst, because if 99% of people are sound and generous and kind the other 1% will still screw things up and force others to compete on their level.
I didn't WANT to write a scraper to try to get an immigration appointment so I could stay in my country, but other people did (and then started selling the appointments), so I did too because otherwise I'd have to give a scalper money.
Sooner or later someone was going to write this. I suspect many others already have.
Asking people to forego whatever small advantages they have-- because others don't-- is foolish, IMO.
In other conversation I have seen the following explanation: those systems were designed for a much different supply demand balance than we see today, they just haven't had time to adjust things yet.
I feel like as much as this app is well intentioned, it will only make this problem worse.
The bottle neck isn't on the technology side. It's on the operations side.
Extending the order window ahead would work, but they'd have to do a "check in" before hand to actually pick your order, otherwise you wouldn't be able to know if things will be in stock 10 days ahead of time.
What looks simple from the outside is often much harder when you actually do it.
I assume the stores want to sell as much as possible, from greed if nothing else. If there are bottlenecks in making that happen, they're probably hard to overcome quickly.
...I guess I just got annoyed by the word "needlessly"...
Yeah, thanks, guys, that's really helpful. You've been screwing around with grocery delivery for what, 15+ years now, and still can't make it work?
Unfortunately, not really. Releasing later slots barely helps but it makes delays longer.
I recommend reading up a little queuing theory.
When there's more demand than supply, the queue will grow unboundedly, and so will the average waiting time.
What this means for online shopping is the same as what it means for web sites:
Latency gets continually longer for almost everyone at the same time, while throughput doesn't noticably change.
I saw an online grocery store open up slots for more months in advance recently. Now all the delivery slots are fully booked for the next 4 months. That's up to the limit of their calendar. It is still not possible to book a slot. If they open up further into the future, those slots will be fully booked too.
I said you can't book. Actually you can sometimes book a slot by waiting until they add new slots at the end, which rolls over at midnight. That's a little silly of them: The site becomes unresponsive for 20 minutes at midnight as everyone tries to catch the new slots. Most people will find that when the site finally responds, the slots are gone. If you were unlucky enough to be placing an order before midnight whose slot expires just after, you may be disappointed to find you can't complete checkout during the critical 20 minutes, and lose your slot.
The effect for nearly everyone is now they can book with 4 months of delay instead of 1 month.
Actually getting one at 1 month was a lottery. But that hasn't changed, it's still a lottery at 4 months.
Ideally, one should be able to bid on delivery slots. If that is technically difficult, the delivery company should just increase the price.
They could then increase the pay of the staff involved in making deliveries to attract more workers, especially those that are now out of work. More deliveries made overall!
Or, if it is infeasible to increase the number of deliveries, they could donate the surplus profits locally.
Not increasing the prices seems like just pointless virtue-signalling that helps absolutely nobody.
The latter offers some advantages:
1. Increased prices on scarce goods discourage frivolous consumption.
2. Vulnerable people, if they can be identified, can be subsidized or have their fees waived.
3. Those that find they really need a delivery can still book it - something that is currently impossible.
4. Funds can be raised for good causes.
5. People do not have to waste time queuing/trying to get a slot.
If you like, you could operate both systems at the same time - allocate some slots on a first-come-first-served basis, and some slots on a market supply-and-demand basis.
And of course, delivery is not a necessity for many: a lot of those booking slots at the moment could just go to a shop and buy the groceries in person. A market system would discourage them booking delivery slots.
We realized that curbside pickups is a great compromise for everybody's health and safety right now.
We built Curb Run because we found it very difficult to get a curbside pickup slot at our local Wegmans. Willing to drive a bit further away to another location, I hacked together a little script that would check for pickup slots across multiple stores in a radius.
Fast forward, friends and family started hearing about this and asked if we could help them too. We ended up turning this into a web app for everybody to use -- and with many more stores and chains across the US.
We hope that this can help you as well!
Yes, I totally get the concept and could use it myself. But I'm also reasonably young and healthy and would rather shop at the store and let the "at risk" population use these grocery store features to be safe.
The whole reason this exists is because "these grocery store features" don't exist.
Sites should be implementing their own waiting list, but that hasn't happened, so here we are.
what most of us need to do is avoid coughing and breathing into each others' noses/mouths, and that's what the (better) guidelines are meant to prevent. keeping distance doesn't need to be perfect, but best effort, as long as we generally avoid standing face-to-face and talking (especially for prolonged periods, closely, and/or loudly).
it's really fine to go to the grocery store if you don't live with someone sick or immuno-compromised and can mostly avoid other people's spit in your face.
1. Could I just provide a zipcode instead of sharing my browser location?
2. Could I check stores in aggregate? I'd rather discover which local business has the MOST openings and then register an account there, rather than getting to the end of the shopping experience and waiting.
Lastly, you have a typo "seend" in your third step.
1. We decided to use geolocation because it removes one more form field. It also makes it easier to expand to additional countries (https://github.com/MiniCodeMonkey/curbside/issues) we may reconsider in the future.
2. Happy to explore adding additional ways to tackle the problem. For now, we just have a simple map of stores to visualize coverage: https://curb.run/stores
Fixed the typo. Thanks!
If there was a way to reserve delivery slots for the elderly and at-risk, that would be great, but otherwise I see no problem with technically savvy people having an advantage here, if the alternative is requiring people to do manual polling and waste time. Those slots are going to go to somebody. Perhaps some limit to one delivery per week per account to encourage people to order more efficiently. Eventually, delivery capacity will ramp up to satisfy demand regardless.
Do you have any plans on open-sourcing this?
Could you put a warning to be mindful and only consider the service if you're high-risk or in a situation where curbside is the only safe option?
I love the fact that my high-risk parents are using curbside pickup, but I find myself better fitted to wear a mask and do the groceries myself during off-peak hours. The last thing I think the world wants is (presumably younger) people in tech taking up curbside slots before other people in the community.
Curb-side pickup is better as having a ton of people inside small grocery stores considering all of them are not meant to handle large amounts of people attempting to keep a set distance from each-other.
If curb-side pickup becomes more popular they would increase available slots by allocating more resources. What is happening right now is you have one or two managing curb-side and a ton inside managing everyone else.
What should happen is grocery stores should be closed except for employees and your groceries should be delivered to you, or you pick them up curb side.
It would eliminate a whole realm of issues with people not following rules, coughing on produce, not washing hands, moeny exchange, long lines, etc.
And if you implemented a strict health check on employees it would be way easier for everyone.
You're ignoring how it's a costly loss-leader for them. The pickers cost money. The storage space costs money with additions of new customers using the space designed for less until an expansion happens. One, little building might be in the six digits. The IT systems are probably older ones designed for lower volume. They have to integrate with all the other enterprise systems. There's a lot more going on in big companies scaling up than just add more people or slots.
This service makes it harder for us to get curbside slots, until our local store is able to respond to peaking demand, because people with normal immune systems will use these slots out of fear, when they have a much better chance of either not contracting COVID-19 in the first place, or of lesser symptoms if they get it, and in the meantime should be the ones going into the store, so that those with immuno-compromised households do not have to.
Your service makes no acknowledgement of this ethical dilemma.
I do not disagree that our local grocery store should do its best to expand its curbside service. They do seem to be trying, but this product makes it harder for households like ours in the meantime.
I sympathize with your situation, and agree that people who are more at risk should get priority, but suggesting that someone with a normal immune system should not use curbside pickup and just suck it up and go in the store is just... not correct. Everyone should be availing themselves of options that reduce their interactions with other people.
I imagine you and people like you are already frustrated as to how difficult it is to get pickup slots. A website like this can perhaps make it easier on you, as well.
This site and others like it just guarantee that vulnerable people MUST use these sites to even have a chance to get curbside. I guarantee there are those who are not savvy enough, and young tech-savvy people who know how to use these services will use curbside while older, more vulnerable, and less tech-savvy people must go in. I feel bad using a site like this because even though my wife is in a vulnerable group, I know others are worse off and don't have the know-how to use this tool. I want them to have a chance.
You can't say that "people who are more at risk should get priority" AND say that _everyone_ should be doing the same thing as them. If everyone is a priority, nobody is. Yes, some healthy people with good immune systems DO need to take some risks in lieu of those who are more likely to die if they take the same risks.
And spare me the platitude at the beginning of your comment. If you did sympathize, you wouldn't've posted something so tone-deaf.
One of the reasons we decided to release the app was so friends of ours who are immunocompromised could use it.
The ideal scenario would be for grocery stores to switch to curbside/delivery only. I wouldn't be surprised if we saw that happening 6 months from now. None of us know if we are asymptomatic carriers, so we all need to stay out of the public as much as possible.
Our thinking if that if people start using this app, they're staying out of the stores, keeping themselves and the workers safer. Hopefully they can do several weeks worth of shopping at a time, freeing up slots for others.
In the UK, Sainsbury's is limiting curbside and delivery to high risk people. But they're only able to do so because they're getting a list of high-risk people from the government and validating against that list. That isn't really possible for us. https://www.sainsburys.co.uk/shop/gb/groceries/working-to-fe...
Do we support grocery stores in your area? Hopefully this app can help your family, too.
Understandable, but it becomes a gold rush if people with normal immune systems use sites like yours to reserve slots. My only real suggestion is that your site call out the moral dilemma to users.
Basically our only choice now is to use a service like this (which I guess I will now do; yes you do cover our area) or book slots weeks in advance (this is what we have been doing with limited success).
Honestly we are very lucky; services like this make me more concerned for people in situations like my wife's, but who are not married to a programmer who is aware that you need a f*king web scraper to get groceries now.
Apologies if my frustration is visibly surfacing there; I know y'all are just trying to do your best to help with this situation and so I want to provide you with some honest feedback. I would also like to make clear that I'm not suggesting your service is a net negative. Thank you for your efforts.
We hope that since this doesn't require any real tech knowledge, even people who aren't super tech savvy can use it. I've shared it with my neighborhood, which has lots of elderly people, and they seem to be using it okay (only a handful of tech support requests). We think this is a service the grocery stores should be offering themselves -- hopefully it'll push them in that direction.
It would probably be ideal for the US to do something like the UK and force grocery stores to prioritize high risk households... but there's a lot our government's response leaves to be desired.
But even those of us who aren't high risk could still be carriers. I could go in a store and accidentally get everyone in it sick. We ALL need to be avoiding public places. :-/
A good solution is to spread the word as far and wide as possible so that everyone can use your tool, and that at least seems to be what you are doing so good for you.
Have you had a shot at getting national press coverage for this, or even (long shot) having the vendors link to your service?
We haven't tried to get national press coverage because we don't have national store coverage, but once we add some of the bigger regional chains people are requesting (like HyVee, Meijer and Giant/Stop and Shop) we probably will.
The only grocery store we've been in touch with wasn't too thrilled about it and did not want to work together :)
This isn’t AWS where you click a button to scale. Real world scaling has lead times such as “acquiring a new building”, “buying more vehicles” (which need to be manufactured) and “hiring and training more people”.
Edit: typo
Does it involve something other than swapping out customers picking their groceries off the shelves for employees doing the same?
Let's say there are 20 employees in the store fulfilling orders, and they work in two shifts during the day. So that's 40 people in the store that have the potential to interact with each other (though it's really more like two separate groups of 20). If they do the curbside dropoff in a safe manner (that is, without physically interacting with the customer), then it's mostly those 40 people risking transmitting the disease to each other, and that's it.
If you instead allow 20 random people into the supermarket at a time (in reality it's going to be more, which is even worse), and they spend an average of 45 minutes in the store, and their entry and exist times are randomized throughout the day, you have hundreds of people who could potentially interact with and infect each other.
Employees will just naturally be much faster and efficient at gathering groceries than customers will be. They know the layout of the store and where everything is better, and they may also know that certain things are not available, so they won't waste time looking for them. They can even multitask and take care of more than one person's order at a time. They won't be wandering around making impulse purchases, but will be sticking to a fixed list of items the customer ordered. Checkout and bagging will go much faster. This bit is optional, but they could even optimize things further by grouping the most common items in one place, and not stocking shelves like they usually do[0]. I imagine you can serve the same number of customers with much less than half as many people in the store.
There's also the matter of discipline when it comes to distancing. I imagine the supermarket employees are pushed hard to maintain social distancing with each other while working. When I went to the supermarket a week ago, probably a good 20% of the customers I encountered were failing at distancing, further increasing risk.
[0] Consider that placement of items in a supermarket designed for customers wandering around is intentionally not set up for efficiency! They want you to walk through the entire store when making typical shopping run, in the hope that you'll make a bunch of other impulse purchases.
To add to what kelnos said, curbside pickup is better for public health because it limits the number of customers in the store, reducing vectors. It's also better for the workers themselves. Wegmans and a bunch of other grocery stores are using Instacart shoppers for curbside order fulfillment. Comparing that to delivery, an Instacart shopper may go into 10+ different stores on any given day while they're working. Not only is it inefficient, it significantly increases vectors and endangers their health more.
As thecodemonkey has said, we made an intentional decision to only support curbside and not delivery. We've also encouraged people to add items to their own cart for elderly or carless neighbors who can't place their own pickup order. (We also organized a neighborhood effort, before this app, to help people get groceries and prescriptions.)
It would be ideal everyone were able to do curbside/pickup only. But that's not realistic given the short timeframe of this crisis.
In the UK, the government seems to have shared a list with Sainsbury's of high-risk people. We had a friend in the UK ask us to add it, so I tried to sign up, and they said I couldn't because my email wasn't on the list from the government. I don't see such a thing being possible here in the US.
This app isn't perfect, but we released it because we think it helps in a small way. And if we all help in a small way, in whatever our own way is, we'll get through this.
Of course that would be ideal, but scaling up a delivery service from scratch is a bit harder than keeping a store running and offering both services which distributes the load a bit.
This may be true in practice, right now, but do things really have to go to the shelves and then the curb?
If it works as intended, assuming the demand continues to exceed the overall capacity, it's just going to spread out the overload more.
If you have 200% demand then working on getting from 90% to 99% utilization is missing the forest for the trees.
> "It is not about snatching slots as soon as they become available"
Perhaps consider rewording your post title? It's currently:
"Show HN: Get notified when grocery pickup slots are available"
The idea of encouraging people to look for other stores seems to be something grocery stores are doing, I just noticed the Kroger-based chain's website I use (QFC) shows me a list of other locations with pickup availability.
There's a difference between the some rare sneaker drop and buying groceries as a high-risk person in a global pandemic.
Alas...
edit: just checked and they're only doing it for people who are confirmed as high risk (which is good!) Are there any grocery stores in AU that are doing pickup open to the general public?
Several days before that, I had a very annoying problem, which was that I checked the Prime Now app and saw that there were delivery windows, so I added all the items I wanted, and then there were no longer any windows. Also, every time you refresh, it apparently just silently removes from your cart any items which are no longer in stock, which means you better keep your shopping list written down somewhere if you don't have it down by heart!
Imagine the collective amount of time wasted by this appalling UX that they have zero incentive to fix.
(Also is there even a way to setup a notification when Whole Foods delivery slots are available?)
How do I add stores to my sub?
You can add stores by going to the website again and selecting different stores. It resets for each monitor.