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Comment by savanaly | Hacker News Reader

The crazy thing is my local Whole Foods always has a noticeable number of what I assume are Amazon Fresh contractors scurrying around buying large carts of groceries to ferry to people. Fair enough, except didn't Amazon's other employees just go to the trouble of loading everything off of trucks and onto the store shelves a couple hours previously? Why not cut out the middle man and load the goods from the trucks or back room into the delivery vans for the last mile? Hilarious to me that the store floor, optimized as it is for everyday grocery shoppers, is also Amazon's best technology for getting goods out of the hands of one set of employees (excuse me-- contractors-- don't want to bring a lawsuit down on anyone) and into another's.

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Last mile delivery is hard to do efficiently. Sending someone into a huge warehouse to pick up and package, say , two cucumbers and a jar of olives, is ridiculous, so you need to collect items destined for last mile delivery in bulk. Then you divide them up further. To do this you need to create a separate section of your warehouse.

For groceries you have the additional challenge that different items need to be stored differently (cooled, frozen) during the time between getting retrieved from the big warehouse and being sent on their last mile.

You can build something for this, of course, but that’s expensive. In the case of Amazon, however, they already have facilities for storing smaller amounts of different groceries products that are relatively efficient for sending small amounts of products on their way for last mile delivery: they own supermarkets.

A decade ago I worked on some retail logistics and we ran up against exactly this problem. The solution we came up with was also exactly this: send workers into the nearest supermarket to collect the requested items from there. If you already own the supermarkets and have staff running around there, it’s a no-brainer. In fact, if you look closely you’ll see many retail companies, both large and small, do this.

We already have this in the UK via Ocardo.

Rather then supermarket employees running around the shop they build automated warehouses specifically optimised for picking/packing efficiency.

I simply don't see the reason for services like Instacart and Amazon fresh to exist... I can already get deliveries picked and dispatched by the super markets themselves. I count 6 different services within 5 miles of my home/office/isolation bunker.

I think the UK's supermarket delivery services were significantly better developed than in the US. I'm not sure why.

I think the original idea behind supermarkets with long rows of shelves was that some work was being offloaded to the customer. An assembly line where the people move and the items are still, or something like that. So, it actually does track that the format works well for Amazon’s purposes.

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