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 inside managing everyone else.
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.
It would eliminate a whole realm of issues with people not following rules, coughing on produce, not washing hands, moeny exchange, long lines, etc.
And if you implemented a strict health check on employees it would be way easier for everyone.
"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.
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 systems will use these slots out of fear, when they have a much better chance of either not contracting COVID-19 in the first place, or of lesser symptoms if they get it, and in the meantime should be the ones going into the store, so that those with immuno-compromised households do not have to.
Your service makes no acknowledgement of this ethical dilemma.
I do not disagree that our local grocery store should do its best to expand its curbside service. They do seem to be trying, but this product makes it harder for households like ours in the meantime.
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 imagine you and people like you are already frustrated as to how difficult it is to get pickup slots. A website like this can perhaps make it easier on you, as well.
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.
Everything after your first "but" contradicts what comes before it. Should people who are at more risk get priority? Because if they should, then yes, people with regular immune systems SHOULD in fact just suck it up and go inside until there are enough curbside slots available for everyone. Then there won't be a use for a site like this and those healthy people can book their curbside slots on the grocery stores' websites like normal.
This site and others like it just guarantee that vulnerable people MUST use these sites to even have a chance to get curbside. I guarantee there are those who are not savvy enough, and young tech-savvy people who know how to use these services will use curbside while older, more vulnerable, and less tech-savvy people must go in. I feel bad using a site like this because even though my wife is in a vulnerable group, I know others are worse off and don't have the know-how to use this tool. I want them to have a chance.
You can't say that "people who are more at risk should get priority" AND say that _everyone_ should be doing the same thing as them. If everyone is a priority, nobody is. Yes, some healthy people with good immune systems DO need to take some risks in lieu of those who are more likely to die if they take the same risks.
And spare me the platitude at the beginning of your comment. If you did sympathize, you wouldn't've posted something so tone-deaf.
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 need to stay out of the public as much as possible.
Our thinking if that if people start using this app, they're staying out of the stores, keeping themselves and the workers safer. Hopefully they can do several weeks worth of shopping at a time, freeing up slots for others.
In the UK, Sainsbury's is limiting curbside and delivery to high risk people. But they're only able to do so because they're getting a list of high-risk people from the government and validating against that list. That isn't really possible for us. https://www.sainsburys.co.uk/shop/gb/groceries/working-to-fe...
Do we support grocery stores in your area? Hopefully this app can help your family, too.
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.
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. :-/
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 your service?
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 :)
they would increase available slots by allocating more resources
This isn’t AWS where you click a button to scale. Real world scaling has lead times such as “acquiring a new building”, “buying more vehicles” (which need to be manufactured) and “hiring and training more people”.
I think that is the ideal situation too. Closing down grocery stores and allowing no-touch curbside pickup (or delivery) only. I don't quite know what the economics of this is like though, and if it is a viable option across the board.
Fair point! Realizing I haven't thought about curbside as much as only the larger grocery store chains seem to offer it (though delivery seems to be universal). Farmers market here is doing a pre-order drive-through arrangement this weekend after weeks of essentially being closed.
It's not just about reducing the absolute number, it's about reducing the number of possible interactions.
Let's say there are 20 employees in the store fulfilling orders, and they work in two shifts during the day. So that's 40 people in the store that have the potential to interact with each other (though it's really more like two separate groups of 20). If they do the curbside dropoff in a safe manner (that is, without physically interacting with the customer), then it's mostly those 40 people risking transmitting the disease to each other, and that's it.
If you instead allow 20 random people into the supermarket at a time (in reality it's going to be more, which is even worse), and they spend an average of 45 minutes in the store, and their entry and exist times are randomized throughout the day, you have hundreds of people who could potentially interact with and infect each other.
Employees will just naturally be much faster and efficient at gathering groceries than customers will be. They know the layout of the store and where everything is better, and they may also know that certain things are not available, so they won't waste time looking for them. They can even multitask and take care of more than one person's order at a time. They won't be wandering around making impulse purchases, but will be sticking to a fixed list of items the customer ordered. Checkout and bagging will go much faster. This bit is optional, but they could even optimize things further by grouping the most common items in one place, and not stocking shelves like they usually do[0]. I imagine you can serve the same number of customers with much less than half as many people in the store.
There's also the matter of discipline when it comes to distancing. I imagine the supermarket employees are pushed hard to maintain social distancing with each other while working. When I went to the supermarket a week ago, probably a good 20% of the customers I encountered were failing at distancing, further increasing risk.
[0] Consider that placement of items in a supermarket designed for customers wandering around is intentionally not set up for efficiency! They want you to walk through the entire store when making typical shopping run, in the hope that you'll make a bunch of other impulse purchases.
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.
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.
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 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.
Comments
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 inside managing everyone else.
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.
It would eliminate a whole realm of issues with people not following rules, coughing on produce, not washing hands, moeny exchange, long lines, etc.
And if you implemented a strict health check on employees it would be way easier for everyone.
"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.
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 systems will use these slots out of fear, when they have a much better chance of either not contracting COVID-19 in the first place, or of lesser symptoms if they get it, and in the meantime should be the ones going into the store, so that those with immuno-compromised households do not have to.
Your service makes no acknowledgement of this ethical dilemma.
I do not disagree that our local grocery store should do its best to expand its curbside service. They do seem to be trying, but this product makes it harder for households like ours in the meantime.
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 imagine you and people like you are already frustrated as to how difficult it is to get pickup slots. A website like this can perhaps make it easier on you, as well.
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.
Everything after your first "but" contradicts what comes before it. Should people who are at more risk get priority? Because if they should, then yes, people with regular immune systems SHOULD in fact just suck it up and go inside until there are enough curbside slots available for everyone. Then there won't be a use for a site like this and those healthy people can book their curbside slots on the grocery stores' websites like normal.
This site and others like it just guarantee that vulnerable people MUST use these sites to even have a chance to get curbside. I guarantee there are those who are not savvy enough, and young tech-savvy people who know how to use these services will use curbside while older, more vulnerable, and less tech-savvy people must go in. I feel bad using a site like this because even though my wife is in a vulnerable group, I know others are worse off and don't have the know-how to use this tool. I want them to have a chance.
You can't say that "people who are more at risk should get priority" AND say that _everyone_ should be doing the same thing as them. If everyone is a priority, nobody is. Yes, some healthy people with good immune systems DO need to take some risks in lieu of those who are more likely to die if they take the same risks.
And spare me the platitude at the beginning of your comment. If you did sympathize, you wouldn't've posted something so tone-deaf.
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 need to stay out of the public as much as possible.
Our thinking if that if people start using this app, they're staying out of the stores, keeping themselves and the workers safer. Hopefully they can do several weeks worth of shopping at a time, freeing up slots for others.
In the UK, Sainsbury's is limiting curbside and delivery to high risk people. But they're only able to do so because they're getting a list of high-risk people from the government and validating against that list. That isn't really possible for us. https://www.sainsburys.co.uk/shop/gb/groceries/working-to-fe...
Do we support grocery stores in your area? Hopefully this app can help your family, too.
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.
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. :-/
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 your service?
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 :)
they would increase available slots by allocating more resources
This isn’t AWS where you click a button to scale. Real world scaling has lead times such as “acquiring a new building”, “buying more vehicles” (which need to be manufactured) and “hiring and training more people”.
I think that is the ideal situation too. Closing down grocery stores and allowing no-touch curbside pickup (or delivery) only. I don't quite know what the economics of this is like though, and if it is a viable option across the board.
Edit: typo
Fair point! Realizing I haven't thought about curbside as much as only the larger grocery store chains seem to offer it (though delivery seems to be universal). Farmers market here is doing a pre-order drive-through arrangement this weekend after weeks of essentially being closed.
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?
It's not just about reducing the absolute number, it's about reducing the number of possible interactions.
Let's say there are 20 employees in the store fulfilling orders, and they work in two shifts during the day. So that's 40 people in the store that have the potential to interact with each other (though it's really more like two separate groups of 20). If they do the curbside dropoff in a safe manner (that is, without physically interacting with the customer), then it's mostly those 40 people risking transmitting the disease to each other, and that's it.
If you instead allow 20 random people into the supermarket at a time (in reality it's going to be more, which is even worse), and they spend an average of 45 minutes in the store, and their entry and exist times are randomized throughout the day, you have hundreds of people who could potentially interact with and infect each other.
Employees will just naturally be much faster and efficient at gathering groceries than customers will be. They know the layout of the store and where everything is better, and they may also know that certain things are not available, so they won't waste time looking for them. They can even multitask and take care of more than one person's order at a time. They won't be wandering around making impulse purchases, but will be sticking to a fixed list of items the customer ordered. Checkout and bagging will go much faster. This bit is optional, but they could even optimize things further by grouping the most common items in one place, and not stocking shelves like they usually do[0]. I imagine you can serve the same number of customers with much less than half as many people in the store.
There's also the matter of discipline when it comes to distancing. I imagine the supermarket employees are pushed hard to maintain social distancing with each other while working. When I went to the supermarket a week ago, probably a good 20% of the customers I encountered were failing at distancing, further increasing risk.
[0] Consider that placement of items in a supermarket designed for customers wandering around is intentionally not set up for efficiency! They want you to walk through the entire store when making typical shopping run, in the hope that you'll make a bunch of other impulse purchases.
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.
Economies of scale. Employees doing the picking is much more organized and requires far less people than customers doing it themselves.
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.
"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.
Many of the stores offering curbside, like Wegmans, are using Instacart shoppers, so it's not taking away store employees per se.
Sorry. Looks like I misunderstood that, I thought it means that they put it in front of your house.