Reversing Safeway's private APIs to automate coupon collection

It would fit one definition of "are very motivated".

>This encodes a particular definition of fairness: that those who register early, or are very motivated, or simply those with a lot of free time to refresh the site, will get permits.

Why is this definition changing with knowledge something that should be considered wrong? The ability to do this work isn't gated to certain people except by knowledge, and the knowledge itself isn't gated. For the longest time this has been considered a fair way of doing things to get an item in limited supply.

Ordinary people would absolutely use an app that lives in the menu bar/system tray, has a Safeway login page and a "run on startup" option, and once a day does magic stuff in the background that adds all the available online coupons.

I managed at Domino's back about a decade ago when they forced the transition to the updated in-store POS that was required for this.

To add a bit of color to what's happening:

- You don't actually hit an "It's ready" button. When you knock the pizza off of the makeline screen, it transitions from "so and so is making your food" to "it's cooking".

- The "It's cooking" phase is just a simple timer. It's supposed to be adjusted to the time of the conveyor oven (which can vary from ~3-9 minutes depending on the particular oven they use). Most stores never customize that setting in the system, and it stays at the default. And other stores may have ovens running at two different speeds.

- Average make time is one of the metrics monitored by corporate audits, so you do have gaming of the system by knocking pizzas off the make screen early. But you can also have a backup at the oven during rushes, where food sit at the end of the makeline ready to go in the oven when capacity opens. At the same time, some items such as wings have to go through the oven twice (depending on the oven configuration). In both of these cases, even without gaming the system there will be dissonance between actual cook time and the cook time shown in the pizza tracker.

- For those that did try to game the performance metrics, it came with an equal headache internally beyond just that "It's cooking" timer. The scheduling system used that average make time as an input into calculating labor needs. The more you knocked stuff off the makeline early, the more optimistic the scheduler became and the more you'd have to override the suggested schedule and the more "Labor Waste" you'd create by having more people working than the system thought you needed.

It was really quite fascinating to see that system transition before I started my career. I witnessed it at two stores under two different franchises - one did the bare minimum to comply and the other one embraced the new system and it's capabilities. There were a lot of incredibly capabilities and forecasting optimizations that were made possible by the update. But they all presumed accurate data in the system at all times. But in many cases, managers were either disincentivized to do what was required to maintain that level of accuracy or transparency, or a component of the system would be designed in such an idealistic fashion that it didn't allow for the amount of pragmatic flexibility it needed. Both of which have been really valuable lessons I've taken forward with me.

> presumably that agency designed permitting system with the assumption that people with limited time and attention would be vying for the permits by having to visit the site themselves to get one.

That's quite a very large assumption that I don't think we can accept as fact.

> that those who register early, or are very motivated, or simply those with a lot of free time to refresh the site, will get permits.

Perhaps someone who writes a script would count as "very motivated"?

> Does that make me more deserving of the camping spot?

"Deserving" has nothing to do with this in the first place. The only way that works is if you define "those who register early", "motivated", "a lot of free time" as "deserving". I could maybe see an argument for the first two classes of people as being "deserving", but I don't think you can justify "I have a lot of free time" as a reason for deserving anything, really.

Doing first-come, first-served based on availability and the random possibility of a cancellation isn't ever going to be a "fair" system. This sort of system is put into place because it requires very little coordination and work on the part of the agency that maintains the reservations. Holding that up as some sort of standard for fairness, and suggesting that anyone who thinks outside the process is wrong... is a little much.