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Show HN: Get notified when grocery pickup slots are available

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

#51

Post by kelnos »

perl4ever wrote: post #36
kelnos wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

They have to go somewhere. Perhaps if a store went to a curbside-only model they'd organize things in the store based on popularity so the people fulfilling orders could be more efficient, but it still takes people working throughout the day to make that happen.

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

#52

Post by freepor »

baddox wrote: post #33
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 op…

That midnight trick worked for awhile but now they release slots mostly during the day.

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

#53

Post by freepor »

SheinhardtWigCo wrote: post #50
baddox wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 op…

It's incredibly frustrating. They encourage you to fill a cart with items that you can't actually buy unless you get extremely lucky. Amazon Fresh has exactly the same problem. Imagine the collective amount of time wasted by this appalling UX that they have zero incentive to fix.

The flip side is that in the UK where you book a slot and then fill up your cart, there are a lot of people cancelling their carts at the last minute and wasting delivery bandwidth. Of course that has its own fixes but basically this system worked fine until a few weeks ago so everyone is playing catch up.

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

#54

Post by giggles_giggles »

mjwhansen wrote: post #43
giggles_giggles wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

It sounds like this crisis has been especially frustrating to you and my heart goes out to you. One of the reasons we decided to release the app was so friends of ours who are immunocompromised could use it. The ideal scenario would be for grocery stores to switch to curbside/delivery only. I wouldn't be surprised if we saw that happening 6 months from now. None of us know if we are asymptomatic carriers, so we all n…

> One of the reasons we decided to release the app was so friends of ours who are immunocompromised could use it.

Understandable, but it becomes a gold rush if people with normal immune systems use sites like yours to reserve slots. My only real suggestion is that your site call out the moral dilemma to users.

Basically our only choice now is to use a service like this (which I guess I will now do; yes you do cover our area) or book slots weeks in advance (this is what we have been doing with limited success).

Honestly we are very lucky; services like this make me more concerned for people in situations like my wife's, but who are not married to a programmer who is aware that you need a f*king web scraper to get groceries now.

Apologies if my frustration is visibly surfacing there; I know y'all are just trying to do your best to help with this situation and so I want to provide you with some honest feedback. I would also like to make clear that I'm not suggesting your service is a net negative. Thank you for your efforts.

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

#55

Post by leetcrew »

perl4ever wrote: post #46
leetcrew wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

How would you know? I just checked a few times and they are always full, at least since the first week, so I gave up. Doesn't tell you anything about who is using it and how.

I've checked instacart, amazon, and a couple local stores for delivery/pickup slots. there's no place on any of the web forms to indicate that you would be eligible for a priority slot, and I haven't found any news articles to suggest otherwise. my seventy-year-old parents are also unaware of any way to get priority slots, so I am assuming they don't exist. my impression is that the stores consider "elderly hour" to be an adequate solution.

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

#56

Post by mjwhansen »

giggles_giggles wrote: post #54
mjwhansen wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It sounds like this crisis has been especially frustrating to you and my heart goes out to you. One of the reasons we decided to release the app was so friends of ours who are immunocompromised could use it. The ideal scenario would be for grocery stores to switch to curbside/delivery only. I wouldn't be surprised if we saw that happening 6 months from now. None of us know if we are asymptomatic carriers, so we all n…

> One of the reasons we decided to release the app was so friends of ours who are immunocompromised could use it. Understandable, but it becomes a gold rush if people with normal immune systems use sites like yours to reserve slots. My only real suggestion is that your site call out the moral dilemma to users. Basically our only choice now is to use a service like this (which I guess I will now do; yes you do cover o…

Thanks, I appreciate your honesty. We're all struggling through this and need to vent it.

We hope that since this doesn't require any real tech knowledge, even people who aren't super tech savvy can use it. I've shared it with my neighborhood, which has lots of elderly people, and they seem to be using it okay (only a handful of tech support requests). We think this is a service the grocery stores should be offering themselves -- hopefully it'll push them in that direction.

It would probably be ideal for the US to do something like the UK and force grocery stores to prioritize high risk households... but there's a lot our government's response leaves to be desired.

But even those of us who aren't high risk could still be carriers. I could go in a store and accidentally get everyone in it sick. We ALL need to be avoiding public places. :-/

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

#57

Post by mjwhansen »

jhwhite wrote: post #40

I opened a few issues on GitHub. Once I sign up, how do I stop notifications? How do I add stores to my sub?

You can stop notifications by replying DONE to the text message.

You can add stores by going to the website again and selecting different stores. It resets for each monitor.

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

#59

Post by freepor »

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?)

It's nothing too complicated but not going into details since half the people reading this are in San Francisco competing with me for delivery slots.

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

#60

Post by in_cahoots »

kelnos wrote: post #47
giggles_giggles wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> people with normal immune systems will use these slots out of fear I sympathize with your situation, and agree that people who are more at risk should get priority, but suggesting that someone with a normal immune system should not use curbside pickup and just suck it up and go in the store is just... not correct. Everyone should be availing themselves of options that reduce their interactions with other people. I…

There are a limited number of slots available for these sort of services. It would be great if everyone could utilize them, but since that’s not possible it seems the slots should go to people who can use them most. I’m guessing HN readers skew significantly younger and healthier than the average victim of coronavirus, so it would be a shame if a service like this prevented people who really need remote pickup options from using them.
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