Walmart is piloting a pricier 2-hour ‘express’ grocery delivery service
techcrunch.com
techcrunch.com
It's trivial to repurpose any employee as an order picker with 5 minutes training.
Delivery seems MUCH safer -- I don't have to leave my home at all.
Either way, I disagree.
Current stats are I believe 1.25 deaths per 100 million vehicle miles in the US. Someone came up with a great metric to compare risk called "micromorts"
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Micromort
Defined as a 1 in a million chance of death per unit of exposure. All causes in the US give an average of 22 per day in the US in 2010. Traveling 5 miles by car is 0.02 micromorts. Climbing Everest is aprox 38k mm if you are average competence for people who normally do such a thing.
To get the risk profile of going out you would have to get the all cause probability of dying from everything else other than driving and add the chance of dying on a given trip but 0.02 is probably fairly reasonable.
Infectious disease is particularly interesting because its unreasonable to assign a simple probability of infection and then probability of death because if people in aggregate opt to collectively take more risks they each may indeed face only a small initial chance of mortality but their collective choices can going forward spread the virus around and greatly increase their chances of infection in future expeditions.
This is what people who want to assess the risks for themselves usually fail to get. They aren't allowed to do it because they are extremely likely to be bad at it and their risks effect others futures.
Walmart is making a big PR effort to rebrand as a tech company but it seems to be marketing driven.
Edit: this was pre covid.
Presently there is no charge for curbside pickup and they even support ebt for those whom are out of work.
This is about Walmart using the huge online grocery waiting times, and this service as a solution, in-order to educate wealthy shoppers to stop associating Walmart's low price with low quality , and stop looking at the Amazon app as the default way to shop.
In no particular order, those ways are:
1. Highest bidder.
2. Lottery.
3. Highest need.
There is no intrinsic 'fairness' to either of those three priorities to distribution - what any person thinks is the fairest method completely depends on their value system.
However, regardless of your value system, and your opinion on which of these is the most fair, you can probably agree that for luxury goods, #1 is a reasonably accurate proxy for #3... And that for life-necessary staples, it is not.
In the case of grocery delivery in the middle of a pandemic, people with pre-existing conditions, the elderly, and people living adjacent to those first two groups rank much higher on #3, than your run-of-the-mill 20-something-year-old. For the former, delivery is not a luxury good. For the latter, it is.
We already have a bypass mechanisms for the "I'll die if I don't get it in two hours". It's the emergency services system and it's there when your life is in danger and it's currently overprovisioned to ensure capacity.
The problem is if the express versus economy stratification does not actually increase overall system throughput - but instead, attracts more load to the system, as people who don't need it, but were otherwise going to the store end up using it for convenience.
Actually the worst thing would be most people choosing this as they may decide that the cheaper class isn't worth serving at all.
As a thought experiment, suppose there are a few local zillionaires start making "platinum" orders to local markets each day, with a $1M delivery charge. Will the markets stop accepting otherwise-profitable peon orders? No. That part is easy. But what will happen to the price of peon orders as the markets compete? They can afford to lower those prices a bit, since their fixed costs are spread across all customers, and the zillionaires are already paying the lion's share.
If you doubt this, imagine you run one of the markets and your competitor drops the price of his peon orders by five percent. Are you going to allow the competitor to take all of your business, forgoing the profit you'd otherwise earn?
When you're stuck with an empty cardboard roll in the middle of a three-flusher, you'll pay whatever price Wal-Mart asks.
> maybe $50 a day before expenses
If the alternative is homelessness, people will take this offer. And don't forget, there's entire groups of people who do dangerous jobs daily with little thanks (builders, bin men, etc..) so I don't think they'll have a problem filling these spots.
Instacart is paying ~CAD$30 gross per shopping trip but seems riskier and more annoying so I haven't hopped on that.
Many of us, myself included, are working from home and have totally flexible schedules. I wouldn't mind just dropping everything and heading over to the store.
You get your products quicker and have a greater selection as well.
And that may be true most of the time, but not during this pandemic, if you want to stay home to protect yourself. None of those places have delivery, at least not that I know of, so I would have to go there to shop. I'm not even sure if they have Curbside pickup options.
One of the local chains where I live just added curbside this week — seven (eight? nine?) weeks into this.
The larger ones have had home delivery for a fee.
For a vast number (possibly a majority) of Americans, Walmart is their local grocery store.
Everything about the company screams crap. Every time I go to a Walmart store, I feel as if I lose several IQ points. I have stopped going there.
Their only saving grace, is that I don’t trust Amazon to buy certain things, which means I’d rather buy it from a physical store. But I’d still choose any other company, than Walmart.
But, if they can offer decent delivery, with the option to return stuff, then I might try them out. I dislike returning stuff at Walmart.
I haven't shopped at a store with those arrows, so I haven't seen how well they work, I can only guess...
If someone is standing in the aisle comparing two products, are you going to wait for them so you don't pass them?
If you only need one item and it's in an aisle towards the front of the store, are you going to follow the arrows so you go further towards the back of the store and down an aisle that you didn't need to go down?
Are the arrows going to prevent you from walking through someone else's exhaled air?
It seems more like something to appear doing good than actually doing good.
In most aisles, it's almost impossible to maintain your distance from others if people are traveling in both directions, since you're frequently passing closely. If everyone makes a one-way "circuit" around the store, you can maintain pretty large distances.
That said, at this point, I'll take the arrows and my six feet, for starters. When I'm in a store, which I've done once in the last six weeks...
And yes, wait for the person to move on, don't squeeze past them, that's the whole point.
I have no data but it seems like something that would be helpful.
I don't see any evidence that I'm in the minority in my behavior on this point. If you believe there's risk in passing someone, I think you also have to believe that there's risk in standing 6 feet behind them for a needlessly prolonged period of waiting.
There is risk in both things. There's risk being in the same room, typing on the same keypad for payment, risk in being near people outdoors.
So we take calculated measures to reduce the risk. The advice is maintain six feet, but that's not some magic number between risk and no risk.
I don't feel assaulted if somebody passes by me either, but I'm not aiming to voluntarily increase my risk by intentionally causing myself to come close to other people if I can just hang back or go another way. I don't care what the majority of the behavior is, we all have to do what seems reasonable to us.
I'm lucky enough that I can almost completely avoid being in the store at all, or anywhere else that has groups of people, which I do since that's the lower risk approach.
My partner has a respiratory condition, we have elderly relatives that we bring food to, we have to try any practical steps we can do not pass on the disease to other people in our lives, who might have a very bad time or die if they get it.
Edit: spare me from your acrobatics that make this sound like a fair move by such a wholesome company. I'm sorry if I don't bend over for the company that tells employees to go on food stamps instead of paying a fair wage.
imo saying they're using the pandemic for profit by giving you an option to not have to wait 2 weeks is like saying the drivers of these services are just taking advantage of the pandemic. It becomes pretty meaningless.