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Comment by sukuriant | Hacker News Reader

"I really need those cough meds right now."

"Mooooom, we're out of milk, and I want CEREAL!!!"

"Alright, so I have everything for dinner, but it looks like we're a little low on butter, so I can't make the cake like I wanted to :/"

Now add that you have kids to the scenario, and you've got to drag them along to what should be a 3 minute shopping trip.

There are a lot of situations where taking that long for something is pretty unacceptable.

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I can see how 2 days can be unacceptable, but those reasons are just plain bad planning.

People plan poorly. There's a lot of money to be made helping people through that.

And when these services are widespread, people will be free of the necessity to expend energy "planning" their access to the essentials of life. Then we can focus on bigger and better things.

How would this service solve running out of milk at breakfast? How is this a problem that must be solved before we focus on bigger and better things?

This is bigger and better things. Every cancer research scientist with kids probably loses hours of potential work time a month dealing with dumb shit like "we're out of milk" that this would solve. I don't think being super-narrow-minded about "big ideas" contributes a whole lot to the progress of society; if it's something lots of people are willing to pay for, you have to accept the possibility that it's useful and contributes to society in a way that you couldn't think of immediately.

Seriously? Bad planning? Those reasons are things that happen to everyone, sometime. Are you perfect?

Bad planning happens.

Eh, cough syrup expires. I had a nasty cough a few months ago, and discovered that my previous bottle of cough syrup was 5 years old.

Or.. you can use the myriad of grocery delivery services available to get a delivery within hours. Not everything needs to be bought on Amazon.

> Or.. you can use the myriad of grocery delivery services available to get a delivery within hours. Not everything needs to be bought on Amazon.

You make it sounds like they're commonplace.

Most major metropolitan areas have grocery delivery services either via the grocery stores themselves or a TaskRabbit like service (Instacart, etc.)

Not this one. TaskRabbit doesn't serve Atlanta, Instacart is limited to a small number of cities and doesn't exist this far out from Atlanta's core, and none of the 7 grocery store chains within 30 miles delivers.

Have you heard of subscribe and save? It prevents all of those (given fresh) and saves amazon in shipping costs.

I have not; but the point around my list was the sudden 'woops', where things are eaten up more quickly than expected, or there's a surprise one-off expense. Cough syrup, in particular, is more of a one-off thing. Most people don't run out of it on a schedule

Sadly, like the Target predicting a pregnant teen, Amazon could probably use data to figure out when you need cough medicine.

The ultimate operations experience is JIT arrival based on predictive behaviors.

That sort of research could be invaluable to the CDC and may in fact be worth researching more closely

I find the definition of oneself "as a consumer with children". What parent isn't a 'consumer'? Some isolated hill-family that shoots their own food and lives off the land? It sounds like there's some sort of entitlement expected from that definition, the same way people expect entitlement when they say "as a taxpayer..."

A single person doesn't have to manage the additional stress of children wanting to play with our touch all the things in the store.

Children don't want to have to be drug around to a store just so they don't get in trouble / hurt at home.

So, there is a bit of difference between a consumer and a consumer that has children. The difference being that the monotonous tasks like shopping are more difficult with rogue agents.

I don't have kids, this is just my assessment of the situation.

Please read my comment again, and you'll see that it's not the "with children" part that I am talking about. My first sentence is admittedly missing a bit: "... to be weird". Describing yourself as a consumer is entirely redundant in this context, and it makes it sound like you should get special treatment for some reason.

Ah. That wasn't me, that was deftnerd. I didn't read the subtext in their words that you did. Then again, I agree shopping with kids is a greater hassle than shopping without them, so I probably just skimmed over it without any mental triggers or bias.

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