
Walmart is piloting a pricier 2-hour ‘express’ grocery delivery service - hhs
https://techcrunch.com/2020/04/30/walmart-is-piloting-a-pricier-2-hour-express-grocery-delivery-service/
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michaelmrose
Curbside pickup is about as safe and easier to scale.

It's trivial to repurpose any employee as an order picker with 5 minutes
training.

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xyzzy_plugh
How is it about as safe? What if I don't have a car?

Delivery seems MUCH safer -- I don't have to leave my home at all.

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nightfly
There is no effective difference in the safety of delivery vs curb side
pickup.

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cheeze
Driving is by far the most dangerous thing that folks do on a regular basis.
If I get delivery I don't drive, but I am offloading that risk to someone
else.

Either way, I disagree.

~~~
michaelmrose
It is AS safe insofar as risk of infection. The risk of driving to the grocery
store is pretty low if you are at not to much below average in your driving
skills and not drunk.

Current stats are I believe 1.25 deaths per 100 million vehicle miles in the
US. Someone came up with a great metric to compare risk called "micromorts"

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Micromort](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Micromort)

Defined as a 1 in a million chance of death per unit of exposure. All causes
in the US give an average of 22 per day in the US in 2010. Traveling 5 miles
by car is 0.02 micromorts. Climbing Everest is aprox 38k mm if you are average
competence for people who normally do such a thing.

To get the risk profile of going out you would have to get the all cause
probability of dying from everything else other than driving and add the
chance of dying on a given trip but 0.02 is probably fairly reasonable.

Infectious disease is particularly interesting because its unreasonable to
assign a simple probability of infection and then probability of death because
if people in aggregate opt to collectively take more risks they each may
indeed face only a small initial chance of mortality but their collective
choices can going forward spread the virus around and greatly increase their
chances of infection in future expeditions.

This is what people who want to assess the risks for themselves usually fail
to get. They aren't allowed to do it because they are extremely likely to be
bad at it and their risks effect others futures.

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taway555
It makes sense. Just like "economy" vs "first class" for travel. As a
business, it needs to partition out the consumer buckets into various groups
for profit maximization.

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Spivak
"Pay less if it's not urgent" doesn't sound evil or anything. Like the
pandemic has proved that delivery workers are a scarce resource, what do you
want them to do, have a raffle?

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scollet
It sounds like it's actually "pay more if it is urgent".

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downerending
In a competitive market, it really will be "pay less if it's not urgent". In
particular, if you're a peon flying coach, you _want_ some people flying first
class, because they are effectively subsidizing your ticket. Bring on the
rich!

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bluGill
The ecconmics of airplanes is different and do not apply. Here you want enough
people paying for the cheap service that it makes money so they don't kill it.
There is no advantage to a class of service that doesn't pay for itself in
this space, you just move up to the next one.

Actually the worst thing would be most people choosing this as they may decide
that the cheaper class isn't worth serving at all.

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downerending
I don't think this analysis is correct. No one's going to offer a service if
it's cheaper not to, yes. But if there's only one class of service, you have
to make $X on each order to cover your fixed costs. If there are multiple
classes, the cheapest class could end up being $(0.8X) and still allow you to
make _more_ money overall.

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bluGill
In an airplane the (.8x) works out because the seats are going anyway. I don't
see how that works for Walmart where they can not do the delivery.

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aarong11
Think of it as an SLA. People optimise for different outcomes, some people
_need_ their groceries in a 1 hour timeslot because they have other
commitments.

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bluGill
I agree, but what does that have to do with Walmart providing some class at a
loss?

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downerending
It's not at a loss, it's just at a rate they couldn't support if it were there
_only_ rate.

As a thought experiment, suppose there are a few local zillionaires start
making "platinum" orders to local markets each day, with a $1M delivery
charge. Will the markets stop accepting otherwise-profitable peon orders? No.
That part is easy. But what will happen to the price of peon orders as the
markets compete? They can afford to lower those prices a bit, since their
fixed costs are spread across all customers, and the zillionaires are already
paying the lion's share.

If you doubt this, imagine you run one of the markets and your competitor
drops the price of his peon orders by five percent. Are you going to allow the
competitor to take all of your business, forgoing the profit you'd otherwise
earn?

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dx87
Not sure how this is going to work, even the standard service is completely
booked until next week at my local Walmart, unless they'll reserve some
drivers for the 2-hour service.

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exhilaration
You can't blame Walmart for that, that's case everywhere, from local
supermarkets to Whole Foods delivery. All deliveries are out at least a week
due to everyone avoiding going out because of covid.

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dx87
I'm not blaming them, I just legitimately don't see how they could offer
another service when they're already booked solid and don't have any drivers
to spare.

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bachmeier
26 million workers have lost their jobs in a little more than a month. The
labor market might well be worse than the Great Depression. It doesn't seem to
be a hard problem to solve.

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mywittyname
I get what you're saying, but I have to imagine some people are reticent to
start engaging in such a dangerous task for such a small amount of income.
You're literally putting yourself and your immediate family in danger of
catching a potentially serious illness for the opportunity to make, maybe $50
a day before expenses.

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cameronbrown
I feel like this is an American perspective. From my understanding the danger
is overblown (provided social distancing measures are in place and respected).

> maybe $50 a day before expenses

If the alternative is homelessness, people will take this offer. And don't
forget, there's entire groups of people who do dangerous jobs daily with
little thanks (builders, bin men, etc..) so I don't think they'll have a
problem filling these spots.

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analog31
Just a thought, make it optional to get rid of the scheduled pickup time. I
would be happy with an expected average waiting time, and have them text me
when it's ready.

Many of us, myself included, are working from home and have totally flexible
schedules. I wouldn't mind just dropping everything and heading over to the
store.

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nojito
It’s almost always better to use your local grocery store.

You get your products quicker and have a greater selection as well.

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cableshaft
I assume you mean local as in not large corporations like Walmart or Meijer or
Target or Jewel. Because those are local for people also.

And that may be true most of the time, but not during this pandemic, if you
want to stay home to protect yourself. None of those places have delivery, at
least not that I know of, so I would have to go there to shop. I'm not even
sure if they have Curbside pickup options.

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reaperducer
_I 'm not even sure if they have Curbside pickup options._

One of the local chains where I live just added curbside this week — seven
(eight? nine?) weeks into this.

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ngngngng
I would love use a Walmart grocery delivery service, but they use a 9 mile
radius around their stores to qualify for delivery and I'm 10 miles away from
the nearest store.

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reaperducer
Keep trying. I wasn't part of the Wal-Mart delivery area until last week. They
seem to be expanding lately.

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blackrock
This seems interesting, but I highly doubt Walmart can make it work.

Everything about the company screams crap. Every time I go to a Walmart store,
I feel as if I lose several IQ points. I have stopped going there.

Their only saving grace, is that I don’t trust Amazon to buy certain things,
which means I’d rather buy it from a physical store. But I’d still choose any
other company, than Walmart.

But, if they can offer decent delivery, with the option to return stuff, then
I might try them out. I dislike returning stuff at Walmart.

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makerofspoons
As a customer I would rather they solve the problem that their pickers
decrease the usability of their stores.

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lostapathy
I had a good laugh yesterday at their store. They have finally put one-way
stickers on the floor to indicate aisle directions. The only people I saw
going the wrong way were wal-mart order pickers.

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RandomBacon
Serious: Are those stickers any better?

I haven't shopped at a store with those arrows, so I haven't seen how well
they work, I can only guess...

If someone is standing in the aisle comparing two products, are you going to
wait for them so you don't pass them?

If you only need one item and it's in an aisle towards the front of the store,
are you going to follow the arrows so you go further towards the back of the
store and down an aisle that you didn't need to go down?

Are the arrows going to prevent you from walking through someone else's
exhaled air?

It seems more like something to appear doing good than actually doing good.

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downerending
> Are the arrows going to prevent you from walking through someone else's
> exhaled air?

In most aisles, it's almost impossible to maintain your distance from others
if people are traveling in both directions, since you're frequently passing
closely. If everyone makes a one-way "circuit" around the store, you can
maintain pretty large distances.

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steffan
I think the point stands - the standard 6' / 1.5m guidelines are completely
arbitrary and it's likely that droplets remain suspended for some period of
time, so regardless of direction, you're certain to encounter potential
infectious agents if you're in an aisle within 15-30+ minutes of someone
contagious passing through.

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downerending
Yeah, I was merely responding to the naive "why are there arrows?" part of
that. The true story is more complex and probably mostly unknown at this
point.

That said, at this point, I'll take the arrows and my six feet, for starters.
When I'm in a store, which I've done once in the last six weeks...

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kristopolous
using clayton christensen, what's in the downmarket forcing them to retreat
upmarket?

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petra
They're not retreating. It's an additional service.

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freepor
Also a way around price gouging laws. Many vendors cannot raise wages to
attract more couriers since they are legally barred from raising prices. So
they position this as a new service.

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octernion
hah, not only are they copying Instacart's business model, they also copied
the naming
([https://www.instacart.com/store/express](https://www.instacart.com/store/express))

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teej
_express_ isn't a particularly novel brand term.

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Spivak
_express_ to mean getting something faster. Unheard of!

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battery_cowboy
Yet another way a huge corp is using this pandemic to make more profit. Now,
some elderly person, cancer patient, etc won't be able to get a delivery slot
because they cannot afford the premium for the faster service, and this will
take resources from the cheaper delivery choice.

Edit: spare me from your acrobatics that make this sound like a fair move by
_such_ a wholesome company. I'm sorry if I don't bend over for the company
that tells employees to go on food stamps instead of paying a fair wage.

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hombre_fatal
If it's so lucrative why isn't there an UberEats for groceries (if there isn't
one) and why can't these people just use those services?

imo saying they're using the pandemic for profit by giving you an option to
not have to wait 2 weeks is like saying the drivers of these services are just
taking advantage of the pandemic. It becomes pretty meaningless.

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Jarwain
Instacart would be the "UberEats for Groceries", and already has issues with
running out of time slots.

