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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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”.
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?)
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.
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?
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?
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.
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.
