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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

#71

Post by clairity »

a number of commenters are relying on a misperception that we all need to avoid everyone else as much as possible. that's incorrect, and leads to this rush to overload curbside pickup options and crowd out people who particularly need to avoid the risk of infection: those with co-morbidities.

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.

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

#72

Post by mjwhansen »

gorgoiler wrote: post #67
mjwhansen wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I don’t think you can claim we’re all in this together while providing an unofficial tool that prioritizes people you know and HN readers. A good solution is to spread the word as far and wide as possible so that everyone can use your tool, and that at least seems to be what you are doing so good for you. Have you had a shot at getting national press coverage for this, or even (long shot) having the vendors link to y…

The tool doesn't prioritize HN readers. We released this almost two weeks ago and have primarily posted it on local neighborhood listservs and our own social media so far.

We haven't tried to get national press coverage because we don't have national store coverage, but once we add some of the bigger regional chains people are requesting (like HyVee, Meijer and Giant/Stop and Shop) we probably will.

The only grocery store we've been in touch with wasn't too thrilled about it and did not want to work together :)

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

#73

Post by BurningFrog »

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…

> needlessly limiting

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"...

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

#74

Post by mlyle »

gorgoiler wrote: post #70
freepor wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The rich are hiring serfs to do their shopping and not needing online delivery. Coders like me are writing our own bots to get deliveries. The tall are reaching items on high shelves that others can't. Life isn't fair and you should expect people to avail themselves of any tools to help themselves that are not wantonly destructive to the society at large.

It sounds like your life might be harder than most right now. I hope you’re safe and getting what you need.

That has literally nothing to do with what he said.

Asking people to forego whatever small advantages they have-- because others don't-- is foolish, IMO.

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

#75

Post by mjwhansen »

gorgoiler wrote: post #65

This looks like a neat bit of tech but it doesn’t sit quite right with me. In particular it doesn’t feel very fair to our fellow shoppers. 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…

Ideally, the grocery stores or Instacart will add this functionality so it's baked in to the pickup experience. I honestly wouldn't mind if they did that and effectively forced us to shut down the app. This is a feature they should already have! And there are a lot of examples of people making something that's effectively a feature for an existing product, and that existing product building it.

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.

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

#77

Post by mjwhansen »

LatteLazy wrote: post #69

Please please please make this work for the UK!

We've got Tesco and Waitrose on the list to add! (Sainsbury's is out because they're verifying against NHS lists of high risk people)

https://github.com/MiniCodeMonkey/curbside/issues

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

#78

Post by mjwhansen »

allanitis wrote: post #76

I got all excited when I saw the landing page graphic has groceries from an Australian grocery store: Woolworths. Alas...

sorry :( does Woolworth's have curbside? Maybe we could add it!

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?

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

#79

Post by gorgoiler »

mjwhansen wrote: post #75
gorgoiler wrote: post #65

This looks like a neat bit of tech but it doesn’t sit quite right with me. In particular it doesn’t feel very fair to our fellow shoppers. 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…

Ideally, the grocery stores or Instacart will add this functionality so it's baked in to the pickup experience. I honestly wouldn't mind if they did that and effectively forced us to shut down the app. This is a feature they should already have! And there are a lot of examples of people making something that's effectively a feature for an existing product, and that existing product building it. The selfish route woul…

Thanks for the thoughtful response. It’s clearer you’ve thought about these issues. The nudge towards an associated charity seems like a really good idea.

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

#80

Post by ShakataGaNai »

thecodemonkey wrote: post #2

Hi HN! 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 heari…

How do you assure that this tool isn't used by the lazy techno-elite to snatch up all the delivery slots? Rather than say the older and technically less literate, whom are probably more at risk and more in need of those delivery slots?

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.

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