Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Americans, it turns out, would rather visit a store than buy food online

bloomberg.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

411–420 of 488 posts

Re: Americans, it turns out, would rather visit a store than buy food online

#411

Post by carlmr »

joeyjojo wrote: post #370
crazygringo wrote: post #268

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Playing devil's advocate: an enormous amount of food waste is caused by people simply refusing to buy ugly food. Playing double-devil's advocate: 1) Most people have no problem buying ugly food. Much of the standardization of produce comes from packaging and packing requirements. Non-standard produce is still consumed in other forms: juice, frozen, soup, etc. 2) The vast majority of food waste comes from unsold res…

I've always had an issue with the "people should buy ugly food" argument. It strikes me as being somewhat elitist, and I have my doubts that the people making this argument actually follow through themselves and pick the ugly food at the supermarket, or really know if actually makes any difference. I feel like I am doing the right thing by buying fruit and vegetables instead of processed food. Do I now need to make f…

My local store sells 3Kg of potentially bruised apples for the price of 1Kg non-bruised.

I often buy the bruised ones and cut off the bruised parts before eating. But I make this choice because while I do see a lower value in bruised apples, I don't see the value lower by a factor of 3. I usually cut off just 10-20% of the apple.

If I paid full price for a bruised product I'm right to feel taken advantage of.

Re: Americans, it turns out, would rather visit a store than buy food online

#412

Post by watwut »

kerkeslager wrote: post #14
elmerfud wrote: post #2

It's not that I want to visit the store it's that I can't trust the store people to properly pick out fresh produce or good meat. When the stock person just takes a bucket of apples and dumps them in without care so most of them are bruised, why would I want that same person selecting which apples to send me? Often times to find 3 apples I have to examine 10+. Most of the produce selection is this way. Meat selection…

Playing devil's advocate: an enormous amount of food waste is caused by people simply refusing to buy ugly food. It's literally less wasteful to shave off most of a carrot so that it's a baby carrot, than to try to sell the same carrots as-is. There's nothing wrong with the ugly carrots--but they'll rot on the shelves. Bruised apples are perfectly edible. Maybe you just don't like them, and that's fine--there's no ac…

> Bruised apples are perfectly edible.

And you have to eat them fast, because they get bad more quickly compared to non-bruised apple. And that is big difference, between apple that I can eat next two weeks and one I can not.

Re: Americans, it turns out, would rather visit a store than buy food online

#413

Post by davidw »

irrational wrote: post #400
davidw wrote: post #351

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> For most living Americans, I think you can make a fair argument that this is the biggest disaster in their lifetime. I'm in my 40ies, and while other things are more easily boiled down to a single image or two that get seared in your brain, like the Challenger exploding or the airplane hitting the second tower, there's simply nothing like it to have happened here in terms of the toll in human lives and myriad other…

I suppose part of it is my view is colored by my own experience. My governor totally shut down our state very early and still hasn’t really started opening it back up. Because of that we have had very very few cases. I don’t know of anyone that got sick, much less died. I very much live in a middle class neighborhood (receptionists, elementary school teachers, paramedics, mail men, etc.) but none of my neighbors or f…

It's interesting how much all of this depends on some people's ability - or lack thereof - to look at and contemplate life beyond their bubble.

I mean... I'll admit that when it was just something in China, I didn't pay a ton of attention. But when it hit Italy - a modern, wealthy country with great health care, and honest reporting... it was obvious that it was real, and serious. The image of the army trucks carrying away bodies from the hospital will stick with me for a long time.

If you haven't been hit hard, you're lucky, and it's likely because things got shut down early.

Re: Americans, it turns out, would rather visit a store than buy food online

#414

Post by aspenmayer »

arthurcolle wrote: post #406
bane wrote: post #48

We decided to order a bunch of things from Costco a few weeks ago through instacart. Actually we decided to do it before then, but the site was broken for a bit. It was crazy expensive. Not only the delivery fee, the tip, etc. But every item was marked up significantly over the in-store price, with no indication that was the case. We even pulled out some old receipts to verify this price difference. Apparently part o…

Sorry for hijacking this but what happened to DeepField? I have been looking for a decent way to do named entity extraction from news articles but havent had much luck in finding decent open source libs for this but saw an old post of yours that linked to GitHub but the repo appears to be gone.

I am not OP, so sorry if this is unrelated.

https://gitlab.com/ternaris/marv-robotics

https://ternaris.com/marv-robotics/

https://github.com/regularcoder/deepfield

https://developer.salesforce.com/forums/?id=9060G0000005eHrQ...

https://github.com/deepfield

Re: Americans, it turns out, would rather visit a store than buy food online

#415

Post by davidw »

bradknowles wrote: post #405
davidw wrote: post #274

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We've had an ok experience with instacart. I've tried to think of it sort of like ... when you stop at a little store in a small town before going camping, and there's not a great selection and it's kind of expensive. But you are happy to get some of the things you need, and it's ok if it's not perfect, because we're in the middle of a disaster of epic proportions. That said, I'm really looking forward to doing my ow…

One of the big problems with InstaCart is that they own the relationship with the customer — all the store knows is that InstaCart shopper #76957831 bought certain items. That’s it. And InstaCart keeps your history, so if you want to buy those same items somewhere else that is cheaper, then InstaCart makes that easy. These are not problems for the customer, but they are problems for any store. Any store worth doing b…

I'd ditch Instacart if there were something better pretty quickly, but it's been a nice, low stress way to get food and essentials.

Re: Americans, it turns out, would rather visit a store than buy food online

#416

Post by retsibsi »

gregmac wrote: post #352
adrianmonk wrote: post #322

Earlier quoted context omitted.

About substitutions, I'm guessing they haven't explored what all they can do with that and there are probably some easy wins still available. Right now it seems to be pretty capricious and up to the whims of someone who is in a hurry and whose primary responsibility is pulling things from shelves. They could use software to make educated guesses. Random ideas: (1a) Allow customers to rate substitutions after the fact…

I think substitutions are way, way more complex than that. Just from my own experience: I eat low carb (keto). Recently I had vanilla yogurt (22g carbs) substituted for Greek yogurt (5g carbs), which I basically can't eat. There's a handful of other things where the carbs can vary wildly between brands such as sausages, salad dressing, and BBQ sauce. Not to mention that many people think the "low fat" version of anyt…

Maybe they can just give the customer more direct control. It wouldn't require anything complicated: simply allow me to select any substitutes I would be happy to accept. (Make this optional, and leave the current system as the default.)

If they want to make it easier, they can give me the list of items they would consider as substitutes, and allow me to add/remove items. And they can remember the choices I've made in the past.

Re: Americans, it turns out, would rather visit a store than buy food online

#417

Post by fergie »

kbos87 wrote: post #316

I see a lot of commentary about experiences people have had with grocery delivery services. I think this may be part of it, but it isn’t why I never have and likely never will use one. I think there’s a large number of people who don’t mind, and sometimes actually enjoy grocery shopping. It’s a relaxing activity that fits into my week. For me, it’s a chance to be out in the world, using my senses, exploring new thing…

Totally agree, even under COVID circumstances. If it wasnt for the weekly shopping trip I would never have realised that for a lot of people life was carrying on nearly as normal.

Online shopping feels too much like work (as in it feels like I am at work). I find that wondering around grocery stores is a good way to reset my brain.

Re: Americans, it turns out, would rather visit a store than buy food online

#418

Post by volkl48 »

TuringNYC wrote: post #130
denimnerd42 wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You don't get any discount in this case though. You're still paying $2-3/lb for bruised apples that are like you said literally waste at that point and $2-5/lb for chicken that if you picked out yourself would be of higher quality. Even if they did give you a price break for lower quality food. They'd still do things like give you a pineapple that will never ripen before it rots like we received last week.

When I lived in Brooklyn, the standard at most fruit/veg vendors was to have the best stuff inside and the bruised stuff outside (e.g., at 40cents/lb discount.) We usually brought from the outside and did the math on whether the recoverable portion was worth the discount. Unfortunately the supermarkets do not work this way -- they seem to have one class of goods. I'm not sure what happens to their bruised goods, but…

In Boston, there's an outdoor public market (Haymarket) that operates Friday/Saturday and basically sells dirt cheap produce (and some fish/other food).

The catch, is that it's whatever the wholesalers couldn't sell during the week to the supermarkets and now need to get rid of before next week's shipments come in. It often doesn't have much shelf life left and/or is ugly. And the vendors tend to keep cutting prices to the point of nearly giving away whatever's left towards the end of the day on Saturday. 10% of the normal price still beats throwing it in the dumpster and getting 0%.

It's a nice model that matches people wanting cheap food with the excess/castoffs in the market.

Re: Americans, it turns out, would rather visit a store than buy food online

#419

Post by hansvm »

asiachick wrote: post #55
kerkeslager wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What I'm saying is that your perception of quality is not actually objective quality.

This car has dents but those don't matter. Full price for you. Car still gets you from a to b just fine. This jacket has some holes and few stains but it will still keep you warm.

I know this isn't the point you're making, but the right dent patterns can increase fuel efficiency and make cars more desirable to some buyers.

Re: Americans, it turns out, would rather visit a store than buy food online

#420

Post by arthurcolle »

aspenmayer wrote: post #414
arthurcolle wrote: post #406

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sorry for hijacking this but what happened to DeepField? I have been looking for a decent way to do named entity extraction from news articles but havent had much luck in finding decent open source libs for this but saw an old post of yours that linked to GitHub but the repo appears to be gone.

I am not OP, so sorry if this is unrelated. https://gitlab.com/ternaris/marv-robotics https://ternaris.com/marv-robotics/ https://github.com/regularcoder/deepfield https://developer.salesforce.com/forums/?id=9060G0000005eHrQ... https://github.com/deepfield

no worries, but I was talking about entity extraction from text using NLP and perhaps other techniques.

cool links though! thanks for sharing

Post reply on HN