What I’ve found with Whole Foods delivery is that if you wait for a notification you’ve lost the slot. I use a bot that plays a loud sound when a slot is available and foregrounds the Firefox window. I then have to click the checkout flow immediately. If I’m even a foot away from my machine when it happens I lose the slot. I only get deliveries when I’m active on my PC.
Show HN: Get notified when grocery pickup slots are available
21–30 of 107 posts
Re: Show HN: Get notified when grocery pickup slots are available
#22Have you stopped to think about the ethical implications of this? 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…
for the most part, the grocery stores themselves don't seem to make any effort to prioritize curbside or delivery slots for high-risk people. why should a third-party notification service be expected to do so?
Re: Show HN: Get notified when grocery pickup slots are available
#23Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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. 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.
this is not a delivery service - it's curbside pickup.
Sorry. Looks like I misunderstood that, I thought it means that they put it in front of your house.
Re: Show HN: Get notified when grocery pickup slots are available
#24What I’ve found with Whole Foods delivery is that if you wait for a notification you’ve lost the slot. I use a bot that plays a loud sound when a slot is available and foregrounds the Firefox window. I then have to click the checkout flow immediately. If I’m even a foot away from my machine when it happens I lose the slot. I only get deliveries when I’m active on my PC.
I'd love to hear the details of how you set this up with Firefox? How does the bot work?
(Also is there even a way to setup a notification when Whole Foods delivery slots are available?)
Re: Show HN: Get notified when grocery pickup slots are available
#25Have you stopped to think about the ethical implications of this? 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…
I don't get your question. 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 in…
Hi, my wife is on an immunosuppressant and so we have been trying to avoid going to the store at all, except curbside, because it could be extremely bad if she were to get COVID-19. Save for a single emergency, no one in our household has left home in about a month.
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.
Re: Show HN: Get notified when grocery pickup slots are available
#26Have you stopped to think about the ethical implications of this? 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…
I don't get your question. 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 in…
How does curbside pickup reduce the number of people in the stores?
Does it involve something other than swapping out customers picking their groceries off the shelves for employees doing the same?
Re: Show HN: Get notified when grocery pickup slots are available
#27The fundamental problem here is grocery stores and others needlessly limiting when they make pickups available. Lots of people are sitting at home with extreme schedule flexibility, and would be happy to choose a slot 10 days out or whatever. Instead there is the silliness (and third-party app workarounds like this) of only releasing slots much closer.
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.
Re: Show HN: Get notified when grocery pickup slots are available
#28Earlier quoted context omitted.
I don't get your question. 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 in…
How does curbside pickup reduce the number of people in the stores? Does it involve something other than swapping out customers picking their groceries off the shelves for employees doing the same?
Economies of scale. Employees doing the picking is much more organized and requires far less people than customers doing it themselves.
Re: Show HN: Get notified when grocery pickup slots are available
#29Earlier quoted context omitted.
I don't get your question. 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 in…
How does curbside pickup reduce the number of people in the stores? Does it involve something other than swapping out customers picking their groceries off the shelves for employees doing the same?
It's not just about reducing the absolute number, it's about reducing the number of possible interactions.
Let's say there are 20 employees in the store fulfilling orders, and they work in two shifts during the day. So that's 40 people in the store that have the potential to interact with each other (though it's really more like two separate groups of 20). If they do the curbside dropoff in a safe manner (that is, without physically interacting with the customer), then it's mostly those 40 people risking transmitting the disease to each other, and that's it.
If you instead allow 20 random people into the supermarket at a time (in reality it's going to be more, which is even worse), and they spend an average of 45 minutes in the store, and their entry and exist times are randomized throughout the day, you have hundreds of people who could potentially interact with and infect each other.
Employees will just naturally be much faster and efficient at gathering groceries than customers will be. They know the layout of the store and where everything is better, and they may also know that certain things are not available, so they won't waste time looking for them. They can even multitask and take care of more than one person's order at a time. They won't be wandering around making impulse purchases, but will be sticking to a fixed list of items the customer ordered. Checkout and bagging will go much faster. This bit is optional, but they could even optimize things further by grouping the most common items in one place, and not stocking shelves like they usually do[0]. I imagine you can serve the same number of customers with much less than half as many people in the store.
There's also the matter of discipline when it comes to distancing. I imagine the supermarket employees are pushed hard to maintain social distancing with each other while working. When I went to the supermarket a week ago, probably a good 20% of the customers I encountered were failing at distancing, further increasing risk.
[0] Consider that placement of items in a supermarket designed for customers wandering around is intentionally not set up for efficiency! They want you to walk through the entire store when making typical shopping run, in the hope that you'll make a bunch of other impulse purchases.
Re: Show HN: Get notified when grocery pickup slots are available
#30The fundamental problem here is grocery stores and others needlessly limiting when they make pickups available. Lots of people are sitting at home with extreme schedule flexibility, and would be happy to choose a slot 10 days out or whatever. Instead there is the silliness (and third-party app workarounds like this) of only releasing slots much closer. In other conversation I have seen the following explanation: thos…
> 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.