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Show HN: Get notified when grocery pickup slots are available

curb.run

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Re: Show HN: Get notified when grocery pickup slots are available

#31

Post by kelnos »

djrogers wrote: post #20
dewey wrote: post #14

Earlier 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.

It still takes extra staff to make this happen. Normal grocery staff isn't just wandering around the store aimlessly; they're restocking and doing other administrative tasks. Most of those tasks don't just go away when you move to a curbside pickup model. You still need to hire and train more people to fulfill orders.

Re: Show HN: Get notified when grocery pickup slots are available

#32

Post by smoyer »

I appreciate this effort ... when we thought things were going to get bad in late February, we put about 3 months of food in our larder (like a root cellar but reachable from the basement of our house). We've been ordering about every 2 weeks just to keep it replenished just in case things get significantly worse. I've got three at risk people in my house so we can't really afford for any of (the five of) us to catch this.

Re: Show HN: Get notified when grocery pickup slots are available

#33

Post by baddox »

freepor wrote: post #21

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.

Are you using Amazon Prime Now for Whole Foods delivery? In SF I wasn't able to get a delivery window for several days (admittedly I wasn't checking more than a couple of times per day), but on night on a whim I decided to check right after midnight and was able to schedule a delivery for 2 days in the future. Obviously a tiny sample size, but it appears they only ever schedule for 2 days in advance, and they must open up new windows at midnight (and perhaps at other scheduled times throughout the day).

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!

Re: Show HN: Get notified when grocery pickup slots are available

#35

Post by handedness »

thecodemonkey wrote: post #10
gullyfur wrote: post #3

Hey, this is cool! I tried to setup a curbside pickup for my elderly parents with a local store through instacart, but after getting to the end I discovered it was for next week. Couple thoughts: 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 g…

Thanks a ton for the feedback! Hope this could be helpful for your parents. 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 co…

Please reconsider #1.

Re: Show HN: Get notified when grocery pickup slots are available

#36

Post by perl4ever »

kelnos wrote: post #31
djrogers wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

this is not a delivery service - it's curbside pickup.

It still takes extra staff to make this happen. Normal grocery staff isn't just wandering around the store aimlessly; they're restocking and doing other administrative tasks. Most of those tasks don't just go away when you move to a curbside pickup model. You still need to hire and train more people to fulfill orders.

"they're restocking and doing other administrative tasks. Most of those tasks don't just go away when you move to a curbside pickup model"

This may be true in practice, right now, but do things really have to go to the shelves and then the curb?

Re: Show HN: Get notified when grocery pickup slots are available

#37

Post by nogabebop23 »

protonimitate wrote: post #30
kylecordes wrote: post #27

The 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…

Yes - I bought a microphone that was in-stock for pick-up and a week later sent a "hey, what's up?" email and got a "order ready for pickup" email an hour later. There was no one in the store but they had 10x the number of pickup orders to process. Its a operational capacity problem, not a scheduling one.

Re: Show HN: Get notified when grocery pickup slots are available

#38

Post by mjwhansen »

mandelbrotwurst wrote: post #26
dubcanada wrote: post #8

Earlier 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?

Co-creator of curb.run here.

To add to what kelnos said, curbside pickup is better for public health because it limits the number of customers in the store, reducing vectors. It's also better for the workers themselves. Wegmans and a bunch of other grocery stores are using Instacart shoppers for curbside order fulfillment. Comparing that to delivery, an Instacart shopper may go into 10+ different stores on any given day while they're working. Not only is it inefficient, it significantly increases vectors and endangers their health more.

As thecodemonkey has said, we made an intentional decision to only support curbside and not delivery. We've also encouraged people to add items to their own cart for elderly or carless neighbors who can't place their own pickup order. (We also organized a neighborhood effort, before this app, to help people get groceries and prescriptions.)

It would be ideal everyone were able to do curbside/pickup only. But that's not realistic given the short timeframe of this crisis.

In the UK, the government seems to have shared a list with Sainsbury's of high-risk people. We had a friend in the UK ask us to add it, so I tried to sign up, and they said I couldn't because my email wasn't on the list from the government. I don't see such a thing being possible here in the US.

This app isn't perfect, but we released it because we think it helps in a small way. And if we all help in a small way, in whatever our own way is, we'll get through this.

Re: Show HN: Get notified when grocery pickup slots are available

#39

Post by theIV »

robenkleene wrote: post #24
freepor wrote: post #21

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.

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?)

I have not used it (and I'm not sure if this is what freepor was referring to) but a co-worker sent me this: https://github.com/pcomputo/Whole-Foods-Delivery-Slot
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