Has anyone started scalping pickup slots yet? “If you want toilet paper, you’ll have to buy our pickup slot for $50”.
Hopefully price-gouging laws would apply.
Show HN: Get notified when grocery pickup slots are available
81–90 of 107 posts
Re: Show HN: Get notified when grocery pickup slots are available
#82The 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…
Strongly disagree. The slots will immediately book out to the last available date. So if slots are available in 10 days that just means that everybody has to wait 10 days for their delivery. Increasing latency doesn't increase throughput.
Re: Show HN: Get notified when grocery pickup slots are available
#83Hi 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…
You're welcome to not use it.
The whole reason this exists is because "these grocery store features" don't exist.
Sites should be implementing their own waiting list, but that hasn't happened, so here we are.
Re: Show HN: Get notified when grocery pickup slots are available
#84Hi 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…
Clarification: this app is only for curbside slots, not delivery.
Re: Show HN: Get notified when grocery pickup slots are available
#85This 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…
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.
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Re: Show HN: Get notified when grocery pickup slots are available
#86This 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…
> If everyone uses it and is able to grocery shop less often because they feel less food stress, things are improved.
But that is exactly the issue that gorgoiler points out with the queue example. Everybody won't use your website. Even if you are wildly successful, a huge fraction of people won't use it. Therefore it is unfair. It is like a digital line-cutting tool. The unfairness is the ethical problem.
Re: Show HN: Get notified when grocery pickup slots are available
#87This 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…
" delivery is more risky health-wise for delivery workers (who may have to visit 10+ different stores in a day)."
I've been researching this as part of a brainstorming effort on things like non-profit alternatives to pickup and delivery to get more folks out of stores. I also regularly talk to employees of any place I go to about behind-the-scenes stuff to understand it. Based on how each operates, the pickup people seem to be most at risk because they're:
(a) told where to be by their handhelds at any moment even if people are crowding around that area or them (sadly common)
(b) store the stuff in tight to medium spaces full of other people with similar level of exposure
(c) forced to be at a desk, use phones, or computers that all kinds of people are touching
(d) talk to more people face to face on deliveries if they're a delivery person
Way, way more risky to work pickup if any of the above applies. It might also be more risky to order through pickup if they're not doing lots of sanitation. If you're wondering about that, all you have to do is ask anyone who has worked retail how minimum wage or barely-above people follow the rules if every day is a shit day. Hint: many will care less than the customers they're serving.
All that is just for risk assessment. Far as your app, I have mixed feelings on it like the parent. What I like is that you all put time into doing something to help people do something that might reduce the spread of the virus. So, thanks for doing that. :)
Heck, I had thought about doing the same thing with it just being selectively given to immuno-compromised, older, and/or nice folks. I also have been thinking someone could do some of these online shopping ideas for more well-off folks with differentiators with that money covering cost of both physical space and IT to support more orders from the other people. Kind of like freemium.
Re: Show HN: Get notified when grocery pickup slots are available
#88This 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…
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.
Kind of glum. How about: the rich are donating to those in need, the coders are creating tools to help others, the tall are handing items to others that can’t reach. Life isn’t fair and we should help others when it is not self destructive.
Re: Show HN: Get notified when grocery pickup slots are available
#89Have 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…
"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 inside managing everyone else."
You're ignoring how it's a costly loss-leader for them. The pickers cost money. The storage space costs money with additions of new customers using the space designed for less until an expansion happens. One, little building might be in the six digits. The IT systems are probably older ones designed for lower volume. They have to integrate with all the other enterprise systems. There's a lot more going on in big companies scaling up than just add more people or slots.
Re: Show HN: Get notified when grocery pickup slots are available
#90After 5 days in a row of not being able to get a delivery slot for another grocer, I used a similar tool. Even with the help of the tool polling the website every minute, the slot filled before I was able to complete the order the first few times. So at this point, it's clear that only coders are able to get online grocery delivery from the store I use.
If there was a way to reserve delivery slots for the elderly and at-risk, that would be great, but otherwise I see no problem with technically savvy people having an advantage here, if the alternative is requiring people to do manual polling and waste time. Those slots are going to go to somebody. Perhaps some limit to one delivery per week per account to encourage people to order more efficiently. Eventually, delivery capacity will ramp up to satisfy demand regardless.