Unfortunately, not really. Releasing later slots barely helps but it makes delays longer.
I recommend reading up a little queuing theory.
When there's more demand than supply, the queue will grow unboundedly, and so will the average waiting time.
What this means for online shopping is the same as what it means for web sites:
Latency gets continually longer for almost everyone at the same time, while throughput doesn't noticably change.
I saw an online grocery store open up slots for more months in advance recently. Now all the delivery slots are fully booked for the next 4 months. That's up to the limit of their calendar. It is still not possible to book a slot. If they open up further into the future, those slots will be fully booked too.
I said you can't book. Actually you can sometimes book a slot by waiting until they add new slots at the end, which rolls over at midnight. That's a little silly of them: The site becomes unresponsive for 20 minutes at midnight as everyone tries to catch the new slots. Most people will find that when the site finally responds, the slots are gone. If you were unlucky enough to be placing an order before midnight whose slot expires just after, you may be disappointed to find you can't complete checkout during the critical 20 minutes, and lose your slot.
The effect for nearly everyone is now they can book with 4 months of delay instead of 1 month.
Actually getting one at 1 month was a lottery. But that hasn't changed, it's still a lottery at 4 months.
Comments
Unfortunately, not really. Releasing later slots barely helps but it makes delays longer.
I recommend reading up a little queuing theory.
When there's more demand than supply, the queue will grow unboundedly, and so will the average waiting time.
What this means for online shopping is the same as what it means for web sites:
Latency gets continually longer for almost everyone at the same time, while throughput doesn't noticably change.
I saw an online grocery store open up slots for more months in advance recently. Now all the delivery slots are fully booked for the next 4 months. That's up to the limit of their calendar. It is still not possible to book a slot. If they open up further into the future, those slots will be fully booked too.
I said you can't book. Actually you can sometimes book a slot by waiting until they add new slots at the end, which rolls over at midnight. That's a little silly of them: The site becomes unresponsive for 20 minutes at midnight as everyone tries to catch the new slots. Most people will find that when the site finally responds, the slots are gone. If you were unlucky enough to be placing an order before midnight whose slot expires just after, you may be disappointed to find you can't complete checkout during the critical 20 minutes, and lose your slot.
The effect for nearly everyone is now they can book with 4 months of delay instead of 1 month.
Actually getting one at 1 month was a lottery. But that hasn't changed, it's still a lottery at 4 months.