Well, you gotta get your good one way or another. If the restaurants are closed, you have to make your own.
Wonder if this will last long enough for some people to decide they like home cooking more than taking out... (maybe they bought additional kitchen appliances, etc)
On the other hand once people have to return to the office they will have less discretionary time for cooking...
I think that a lot of people are doing online ordering with instore pickup. I am pretty sure that will count as online grocery sales. But then you drive to walmart, open your trunk and let a human load it in your car.
With the added benefit of grocery workers mostly having good sense of arranging the contents inside a bag, and the box not having to sit out all day before you get to it.
Definitely one of the more rapidly growing parts of the convenience economy. With the much higher average spend and less time dependence, grocery delivery looks much more palatable as an investment and lasting market.
I think it will end up beat by curbside grocery pickup. What is more palatable: a grocery bag assorted with care by grocery store staff who sort things by size and weight when they bag all the time and spend quite a bit of time selecting and arranging the choiciest fruit in the store, carefully lowered into the trunk of your vehicle when you appear in front of the store on your way home, or a grocery bag left on your porch hours ago by someone incentivized to work as fast as humanly possible and pee into bottles in their high interest leased car while they hustle to the next gig?
I'm curious why we have this view that the in-store pickup order worker wouldn't end up just as "optimized" as the general online shopping warehouse worker.
I agreed with you at first, but I recall the Bay Area having one of the earliest shutdowns in the US, and that started March 17. While some companies were definitely sounding the WFH alarm about a week prior to that, I think the March -> April jump would've been more incongruent with April -> May jump unless COVID wasn't the only driving factor behind the August -> March growth in the first place.
Anecdotally, I saw a lot more people ordering online in the last two weeks in March than in late April and on. (And, based on the empty shelves then, probably an equivalent increase in in-person stocking up, too.) Remember that stores were running out of stuff before official shutdowns happened, too.
I'm curious what week by week data would look like.
I’ve been thinking about prices that make this worth it. Amazon Fresh is free delivery over a certain amount with Prime. I’m sure I’m paying a bit more per item but it can’t be more than the time I’m saving by not browsing and avoiding impulse buys.
It seems like a win-win for me. Does anyone have a counter to that?
Some people enjoy grocery shopping. Some consider it low-key exercise (for office workers that do not engage in any actual sports, it's often the 2nd most strenuous regular activity, just after sex).
It's also furthering the trend towards isolation, the segregation into precarious low-wage service jobs vs a feudal class mostly busy with co-ordinating this personal army of theirs. The latter can afford this because they have institutionalised power structures that have kept lower incomes flat for half a century while the tax structure was turned on its head, with the highest incomes now paying lower rates than day labourers.
One would assume that high-paying jobs somehow correlate with value generation. But when shit hit the fan, they were the first to be sent home for half a year and economists are still trying to find anyone who actually noticed that regional key-account managers were mostly just busy with creating funny zoom backgrounds.
Online sales obviously kill brick-and-mortar retail, which leads to whatever the opposite of a liveable city is.
Large companies tend to run more efficiently. Or, more accurately, they are wasteful in ways that do not have the side benefits of, say, a single-proprietor sponsoring some small-town event because that's "how it's done", or continuing to employ someone even when it's a bad business decision, because they have worked with them for a decade and feel a sense of responsibility.
They also heavily favour concentration of market share with just one or very few companies, who are more powerful in relation to customers, employees, and the state. While gains in efficiencies have so far dominated, the beneficiaries of this shift in power will at some point try to cash it in.
>But when shit hit the fan, they were the first to be sent home for half a year and economists are still trying to find anyone who actually noticed that regional key-account managers were mostly just busy with creating funny zoom backgrounds.
I don't get it. You think people were useless because when they went home, it didn't affect the economy. But you're talking about people who were and are theoretically working from home. So you seem to be begging the question. Am I missing something?
Amazon Fresh staff don’t take care of the merchandise. They deliver it in taped-up paper bags or plastic sacks that were in a huge pile, and within the sack they might have apples sitting on a bag of chips or loaf of bread.
Also their produce choices were limited.
Instacart shoppers take much more care but they are very expensive and their lack of knowledge of in-store inventory means they make poor substitutions, requiring me to baby-sit the order while they pick it to veto substitutions.
This is my spouse also. I can't go, lest I pick up something and pass it to them. So we order everything online now. When it arrives, we let it sit for a bit, then bring it in and wipe it down with disinfectant. It's a pain, but we can afford to do it, and it's very convenient. It does suck not being able to just run out and pick up that one thing you forgot, though.
We're not compromised but we do it anyway to be safe. We leave non-refrigerated items in the garage for three days and wipe down everything else.
We're making up the delivery fee and tip by not eating out or going to the movies, and we see it as a small way to put some money into the hands of the essential workers keeping society afloat right now.
The insane thing, is that I went into a Ralph’s supermarket the other week, and I counted a handful of people, that took off their face mask, to talk on their cell phones, while they freely walked throughout the store. They just let the mask dangle off their ear.
It’s like they’re not even trying. Or they are being completely oblivious to the dangers that they are the ones spreading this virus.
And since the spread has continued to rise, I’m wondering if the source of the spread is indeed inside of supermarkets. You have a relatively contained environment, where the air conditioning system can pick up the virus molecules in the air, and spread it around.
WHO say there is no evidence that asymptomatic carriers can spread the virus, and if you have the disease, people should stay indoors. Therefore the mask is redundant.
But wait, the CDC recommend (and where I live TfL have it mandatory) wearing a face mask, otherwise you're "killing grandma".
I've even seen plenty of articles suggesting that wearing the mask is making things worse, or that lockdowns are making things worse, etc.. The information overload is getting extreme.
So which is it?
I wouldn't be surprised if mixed messaging is the reason why people have given up caring.
Example: "Young people aren't affected.. wait, yes they are, wait.. umm wait no they're not"
Our global institutions having fundamental disagreements is so dangerous. I spend hours every day reading into this stuff and I don't have a clue what I'm supposed to do, so how is the Average Joe who just wants to get along with life supposed to know what the correct course of action is?
You know when you were a kid and thought that all the adults had life figured out, then you grew up and discovered that they were just winging it? The older I get I realize the same is true for thought leaders and experts. Nobody will pay you to sit around and tell them that collectively as human beings we don't really have the answer, so what we get is a best guess disguised in a veil of certainty.
>WHO say there is no evidence that asymptomatic carriers can spread the virus, and if you have the disease, people should stay indoors. Therefore the mask is redundant.
What if you're in the incubation period? AFAIK that doesn't count as being an "asymptomatic carrier" because you eventually show symptoms.
>I've even seen plenty of articles suggesting that wearing the mask is making things worse [...] The information overload is getting extreme.
Source for this? I've only heard of mask wearing making things worse by proxy (ie. you're depriving healthcare workers of masks). If that's the basis of those claims, it's totally consistent that masks are good and that masks are bad.
I don't have a source offhand but can attest that I too have seen some of that material - I consume a lot of reading material daily so not sure on where but can say from recollection that it has critically contemplated the role of mask use from a couple different angles:
1) Are people correctly using masks - e.g. taking higher risks than the relative protection given by type of mask being used - just because you wear a bandana doesn't mean you should be hanging out in large crowds; properly wearing/fitting masks; properly disposing/sanitizing masks.
2) comparison of infection rates for other airborne/aerosol-transmitted diseases in countries/cultures where mask use is traditionally higher than the US, e.g. higher influenza infection rates in countries where mask use is traditionally much higher than US despite their success in containing COVID (taiwan, s. korea); comparison of sick rates of professionals who wear masks at work some of the time vs all day (Australian study of nurses, I think??); comparison of sick rates of people who wear veils when in public vs those that don't in same society.
Sorry for lack of source material, but armed with above one might be able to google it out if interested.
Personally, I'm starting to like wearing my largely ineffective-but-anonymizing sheer cloth mask in public. I wear a tight N95 on the plane, which sucks (effective PPE is NEVER comfortable to wear for hours), then junk it, but just try and tell me it doesn't help. I think smart monkeys should be staying home unless they have to be in public space. Strongly disagree with threatening jail time for mask noncompliance tho.
It also feels like you're happy to use some inconsistencies (real or imagined) as license to do whatever you feel like. Considering that only the most deranged lunatics would suggest that health care workers and scientists are actively trying to harm people for some reason, it's odd to pound on any opening they may give you, instead of engaging in a good-faith effort to understand the issues involved and do the bare minimum to protect yourself and your community.
> It also feels like you're happy to use some inconsistencies (real or imagined) as license to do whatever you feel like
Definitely not - my comment was written from a frustrated perspective. The mental exhaustion of keeping up with the latest guidelines, ingesting all these differing opinions and trying to work out what to do, is far more exhausting than reverting to our default state of not giving a fuck (or more accurately: hoping for the best).
It's _easier_ to stop caring, and given the virus isn't hurting young people as much, no wonder they're doing the calculus and choosing to go to the pub and get back to normal. I'd be lying if I said it wasn't tempting.
> WHO say there is no evidence that asymptomatic carriers can spread the virus
So, it's true that the WHO said that, although they've since clarified that by 'no evidence' they mean "we don't know", not "it doesn't happen". ('no evidence' is one of those phrases that people misunderstand). However, _pre-symptomatic_ cases are contagious, and there's no way to know if you're negative, asymptomatic, or pre-symptomatic, so as public health advice "asymptomatic people may not be contagious" is not useful (it's somewhat useful from and epidemiological standpoint).
> I've even seen plenty of articles suggesting that wearing the mask is making things worse
There were some early concerns that masks would make people act more riskily, but this doesn't seem to be the case.
> or that lockdowns are making things worse
Who claimed that?!
Look, in any emerging situation, there's a lot of confusion and uncertainty. But it now seems pretty clear that masks don't make things worse, and there's some reason to hope that they make things better. And they're cheap. So people should wear them.
> So, it's true that the WHO said that, although they've since clarified that by 'no evidence' they mean "we don't know", not "it doesn't happen". ('no evidence' is one of those phrases that people misunderstand). However, _pre-symptomatic_ cases are contagious, and there's no way to know if you're negative, asymptomatic, or pre-symptomatic, so as public health advice "asymptomatic people may not be contagious" is not useful (it's somewhat useful from and epidemiological standpoint).
I understand this, but curbing on fundamental freedoms based on "no evidence" is a hard sell for many of us. I have the luxury of playing it safe because I'm a remote working software engineer, but if I still worked in a shop like I did a few years ago I could be homeless now.
> Who claimed that?!
There was "reasonable" (reasonable looking) evidence that locked down states did worse numbers-wise, but this obviously doesn't control for population density. My point is that nobody knows what's going on anymore.
It sounds like you glided right over the difference between asymptomatic and pre-symptomatic. This seems crucial to the whole cloud of confusion that exists and is being promoted here.
Trying to be as charitable as possible, if you were sincere in saying
>The information overload is getting extreme. So which is it?
The contradiction appears to be directly due to misunderstanding of "asymptomatic" and the follow up comment tried to explain it.
I don't doubt this misunderstanding is widespread, but I don't know how to rectify it and it often seems as though people might be deliberately obtuse.
> I understand this, but curbing on fundamental freedoms based on "no evidence" is a hard sell for many of us.
To be clear, right now, today, there is no way for you to know if you're asymptomatic, presymtomatic, or negative (unless you've had literally no human contact for a couple of weeks, in which case you can be confident that you're negative).
Risk of spreading the disease in this state:
Negative: None
Asymptomatic: Unknown
Presymptomatic: High
So for the average person in the street, it is essentially _irrelevant_ that we don't know what the risk is for asymptomatic spread; there is no practical way for them to know if they're asymptomatic or presymptomatic. It is an interesting question from an epidemiological point of view; if asymptomatic people can spread it easily, then that makes things worse. But as an individual, considering your risk of spreading it, it is irrelevant.
Curbside pickup or grocer-organized delivery isn't just the safest option for you, it is also worlds safer for the community at large.
The risk to people working in grocery stores increases linearly (or faster) with the number of in-person grocery-store visits. The risk to the community is probably roughly quadratic in the number of in-person grocery-store visits.
Curbside pickup is a really responsible thing to do.
It seems equally plausible to me to shame people for using a service when there's limited capacity and some people need it more.
When I originally checked, there were a limited number of slots available at my local stores and they seemed to be all filled all the time. At one time at least, they were even queueing people up to shop on a website.
So telling me it is or isn't something I should do is irrelevant; I would need to think it was something I could do.
It's not the mask, it's the hassle of going to the grocery store and locating the items and waiting in line and dealing with those temperamental self-checkouts.
Today though it's amazing. I put together a grocery order at my convenience and place and pay via the app, and it just magically shows up at my door within a convenient time-frame. I don't have to answer the door, I don't have to talk to anyone, I don't have to sign a receipt. It just shows up.
Grocery shopping was one of my guilty pleasures. Gets me out of the house, walking around, thinking of combinations to cook, etc. Since March, I've been 100% Instacart, and notice them all over my neighborhood each day, so certainly I see the mentioned explosion.
That said, I miss shopping and to be honest, Instacart is both expensive and unreliable. I'll go back to in store once things die down, and I'm sure many others will too. Meaning, I think this is more of a spike than a long term trend.
I am enjoying being able to reflect through out the day, being able to add items to my cart anytime in the day or the next).
I like how much time and gas is saved. I don’t have to change from my pj’s in the weekend, so it reduces some physical and mental overload as well! It’s been an unbelievable boon for me, and it’s worth every extra penny that delivery costs.
It also helps you hold yourself accountable to healthy eating (if that's a goal of yours). I'm surprised how much I like Instacart delivery, and am planning to keep using it after pandemic.
I used to eat pretty much exclusively a mix of fast-food, restaurants, and the occasional frozen meal. Now I'm 100% delivery until there's a reliable vaccine, and I have been since February.
I'm also brand new to cooking and baking, and never really "shopped" at a grocery store in any meaningful sense, so all the things I'm buying from instacart are first-time purchases. I've never made a grocery shopping list. This is all new to me.
I'm having an exact mix of both of your experiences.
I just expect that about 10% of the order will be wrong somehow. I'm sure it's very annoying if you're shopping on a budget, but given that I'm learning to cook and bake and make use of whatever is around, precision isn't super important to me for most items.
I'm also using instacart as my shopping list, which is great, but it's a shopping list tied to one specific store, which is less great.
Here's some free advice for instacart's product team:
* Let me set all items in my order to "no substitutions" and toggle it on for items I absolutely can't be without. Or toggle "all substitutions" and don't nag me to approve each one as they happen. This is the most annoying part of interacting with the app. Just add a "mark all as no substitution" button in your next build, please, I know you can do it quickly.
* Help me shop better. Your "Explore" interface is laughably bad. Cart management is hard. I don't have a solution for you here, other than do it better. Browsing large stores on a mobile device is hard, but this is what you should be working to solve. Improve the UI of shopping as a whole. Spend some innovation tokens here. What you should be trying to do is help me map the universe of products in a way that lets me express my preferences, so you already know which items I consider acceptable substitutes. With enough people doing that, you have seriously valuable ML data. Once you know what I want to buy and what realistic substitution preferences are, you should be shopping for me across every store in my area to find the best overall deal for my cart that fits my requirements.
* Why is the shopper texting me at all? Using the service makes me feel like I'm tethered to my phone or I'm a bad person. If I don't stay connected, your shopper is going to be stressed about my order, and I'm going to end up getting the wrong thing. Your goal should be to remove anxiety from using your service, not increase it by keeping me tethered to my device while I'm visualizing someone else plucking items off the shelves. I've had 1 shopper that didn't text me at all and we communicated entirely through the "approve/deny" substitution buttons, which was still annoying, but less bad than the messages I get from other shoppers.
* WTF is with your fee structure? The app tells me the prices are higher than in-store AND there's a service fee AND there's a tip. This shouldn't be so complicated. I want to see "cost of items in store - cost of items on instacart", "amount paid to shopper", and "amount paid to instacart". The item cost can be savings or marked up due to increase demand or heavy weight or whatever, just be honest about the actual difference between going to the store and ordering on instacart. I know instacart should be paid, just show how many dollars go to paying instacart. I know the shopper is getting paid something already, show me how much, so I can tip accordingly, and you'll probably see a dramatic increase in tips.
Instacart is one of the more broken products that I use because it still delivers value. I get that they'll survive without fixing any of the stuff above, but it's a shame to see the opportunity wasted to build something really great.
The curbside pickup at Walmart is surprisingly good. You pay the same price as in-store shopping and the grocery selection is very good. Instacart is just too expensive. I like honest pricing.
Wally is very good. They got hosed like every other grocer but were quick to retool and revamp, especially online. When the supply chain changed, they changed. We graduated from curbside once delivery became available. My wife and I, each on our own Chromebook, work over the order for a week kibitzing, questioning, suggesting and sometimes ridiculing. Definitely beats pushing a cart around to endless elevator music...
Walmart really fails at providing quality food that isn't highly processed. I find much better quality, and often better prices on the grains and legumes that make up the bulk of my caloric needs, and their selection of organic produce is very lacking.
While I'm happy people have affordable, convenient, and socially distanced access to food, most of what is in the Walmart grocery section are things I wouldn't personally consider food.
Whole foods can't be faked. An apple is an apple. A whole chicken is a whole chicken. There are different farming techniques, pesticides etc but the less processing there is, the less opportunity for quality slippage as well. And it's up to the consumer to fill their cart with highly-processed or minimally-processed items. And like any other grocer, Walmart offers the same spectrum of options.
As I recall, Walmart fills their meat with water, increasing the weight and decreasing their costs.
Found it. "Wal-Mart, for example, says a majority of its fresh offerings are enhanced with a 6 to 12 percent solution of water, salt, sodium phosphate and natural flavorings."
Assuming you're willing to pony-up the money, Walmart offers a wide variety of USDA Certified Organic goodies. From meats to beets. And I personally take great comfort in knowing that only carbon-based compounds appear in my comestibles...
I would think that most of the processed food overlaps a lot with other grocery stores, although it's possible that their suppliers provide lower quality stuff just for them.
I know someone whose go-to for organic stuff is Wal-Mart, because she lives in a somewhat rural area without a lot of options, and Wal-Mart is actually the best.
Especially through much of the current situation, I found stock in grocery stores to be sufficiently sporadic that it made more sense to do things myself so I could substitute and change plans on the fly. And going to a local (non-urban) store early-ish isn't a big deal.
It's better now but the one time I used grocery delivery a long while back (Peapod) because I had a broken foot and had trouble doing a full grocery shopping, it was better than the alternatives but still lacking. I would usually still end up going to the grocery store but that was OK so long as I just needed to put a few items into a shoulder bag.
I also like going grocery shopping for certain items. But only when roads are empty as I visit 4-5 places. I only buy fish from one store in town. Buy my bread from a bakery I really like. A few other things at a small mediterranean store, etc. But I still order many dry things online since it can be cheaper (esp at large quantities) and the selection is great. Things like quinoa, dates, etc.
> Instacart is both expensive and unreliable. I'll go back to in store once things die down, and I'm sure many others will too.
I can't stand Instacart but I begrudgingly use it (for now) because it's the safer option for everyone involved. I also haven't forgotten that they were stealing shoppers' tips for a long time.
I'm not sure what your circumstance is (you might be at-risk for covid-19 complications), but I think a lot of people have been doing the same thing, and I wonder if the risk of going to the grocery store is really so high that it's worth stressing over. Edit: I don't mean go be stupid about it, but between the time you're in the store, people keeping apart and wearing masks, and the lack of news about grocery store outbreaks, it doesn't seem that risky to me.
There's not much difference. Those are yearly numbers. Australians are spending about half as much per person per year as Americans, but the Australian number seems to be at least partly pre-coronavirus.
Covid killed restaurants, a local fresh produce supplier switched from restaurants to the public. The fruit and veg is great quality. I would order online from them forever, but I suspect in time they will switch back to restaurants and I will be left with poor quality supermarket fare.
Instacart has a really smart tactic in showing you how many hours you’ve saved shopping.
Ordinarily I love grocery shopping but after having done online for several months now, I’m not sure I’ll go back. I imagine I’ll order the bulk of the items online, and visit the specialty / small grocers to pick out the odds and ends that are special.
Farm boxes are great too, for organic produce (and growing a garden!).
Wonder how they calculate this with any accuracy. They can't see the time you spend comparison shopping on other online sites to see if you're getting a good deal. (which you usually aren't - Target and Costco, for example, often dramatically raise their online prices vs. their in-store prices)
Agree on the farm boxes - had one of those and we were overloaded with produce. Bit expensive but once you taste fresh carrots it's hard to go back to store bought.
For me the hassle of scheduling the online order really took the shine off of online grocery shopping. Expense was also a factor, but if I need to stay up till 2 AM to schedule an order, I would rather just stock up more in fewer grocery trips and try to go for odd hours
I've had no problem filling my cart and getting a delivery time any time I want. There were some "delivery windows are full" problems early in the pandemic, but no problems now.
Most sites I use make it easy to re-order past purchases so I can get my shopping done in 5 minutes most weeks.
Jewel/ Safeway/ Albertsons online ordering systems are abysmal. Very high friction to browse, endless searching, and when you get to the end you find out that the items you selected are not in inventory for that store. The switch sizes and brands like there was no consideration for price or storage preference.
If you're in the Bay Area and have a car, I'd recommend checking out Cheetah [1]. It's a startup that pivoted [2] from doing restaurant wholesale deliveries (from Restaurant Depot, which only sells to restaurants!) to doing drive-through pickup for consumers. You place an order by app, drive up to one of their parked refrigerated trucks at the scheduled time, and say your name. They load your trunk, and you're done. It's taken the majority of my grocery spend in the past few months and I hope the concept remains post-pandemic.
By doing pickup, you get pretty good convenience (almost as good as delivery), great pricing, and somewhat limited selection (but always reflected in-app at order time, rather than surprising you at pickup time). That's a tradeoff that works for me.
A few months ago you could only order restaurant-sized quantities of things (like minimum 25 lbs of bananas), but they've since started making more items available in "family friendly" sizes (3 lbs bananas, $1.80).
(They do have a $20-off your first order referral promotion I'll mention [3] in case you want to try it, but I'm just a happy customer who wants to see the concept take off.)
They are, but they're just not very good at it in my experience. I tried my local store's curbside pickup and I got no butter plus salsa instead of pasta sauce.
I tried Safeway and it would have been faster to do the shopping myself rather than wait in the car, so it's not something you do just for convenience.
Not sure why so many think this way. In worst case scenario- we are never able to create a vaccine. So you expect the world to stay in lockdown mode for eternity?
It's easy to be post-lockdown but not post-pandemic. Many places in the United States have been doing this for weeks now, and we're seeing how that's going.
A lockdown is a a government-issued stay-at-home order. The presence of such an order should be, but isn't necessarily, aligned with the presence of a prevalent disease.
Not asking for a literal definition of those words. I'm asking what's the difference in living in "post-lockdown" world vs "post-pandemic" world. Personally I think masks will become more prevalent in the west, like it is already in the east. And more remote jobs. In the grand scheme of things, these two changes seem minor to me.
So what is it that I'm missing here? What grand changes in the way we live are we expecting in "post-pandemic" world?
I think eliminating indoor activities that involve being around a lot of other people in a confined space would be a profound change to society.
Some bar owners seem very upset, to the point where they are equating closing bars with denying their right to exist and make a living and suing the government.
Here are 3 that popped into my mind after thinking about it for a minute. Maybe you can come up with others.
If social distancing remains in effect, post-pandemic world would have much lower density in offices/restaurants/other large gathering locations with seating, increasing real estate costs, which will be passed onto the consumer.
If social distancing is required on transportation as well, this would dramatically increase air travel costs. Not only would this require heavy rethinking in any locale which relies on tourism, but also for any conferences/conventions which have a large international attendee component, perhaps requiring a reduction in scope, or being cancelled completely as the economics no longer makes sense.
In-patient hospital costs will also rise as patients can no longer be placed close to each other. Number of tele-medicine providers will rise, and how this will affect the quality of care will have to be seen.
This is all based on the assumption that the current medical tech will stay as it is. But in reality what we are seeing is much faster tests (we have already gone done from few days to get back results to couple of hours now) and much better medical care once you are infected. Which means it will become a lot easier to separate the infected from the rest of the population, rendering the healthy population to work and move freely like they used to.
You can do a quick test before boarding an international flight and permitted to enter the country only if you're healthy. Contact tracing apps can easily show Green-Red passes to prove whether you can enter any restaurant, shop, hospital, etc.
That's a good point. As testing technology advances, many of these will be mitigated. Although until the tests get to the point where they can give results within minutes, like the flu tests have progressed to, it will not be a complete mitigation. Another issue is cost, as once testing becomes common place, I would expect the fees to be passed onto the consumer. Also, people may not want to put up with constant testing, e.g. once every 2 weeks, unless it's a condition for employment, which might be the case for any job which requires high contact with the population.
Sadly, most of the tests with fast results are highly inaccurate. Their false positive rate is way, way too high. You’d get way too many people who are tagged as being positive and kept from traveling (or whatever), which would create another crisis of its own.
Contact tracing only works for you if every person you’ve been in contact with is willing to participate. And that assumes you actually know all of the people you’ve spent enough time around to be considered to have contacted them.
>> You can do a quick test before boarding an international flight
Just curious, how do anticipate this working from a business point of view? If boarding is denied due to a positive test, does the passenger get a refund? If that's the case, won't airlines overbook significantly more than they do today, which in turn will probably increase chaos? On the other hand, if tickets are non-refundable, who would gamble on purchasing an expensive ticket and then be subject to losing it due to a semi-inaccurate test?
Extrapolate the rate of infection in the US (<100K) to get to herd immunity (0.6 * 328M ~= 200M).
It will take ~ 2000 days at the current pace.
New strains of the coronavirus come out once a year, so we should expect COVID-19[a-e] to arrive before we hit herd immunity on COVID-19.
Hopefully they won’t be as bad as the current strain, but history says they’ll be more transmissible and/or more deadly.
Also, it sounds like there are three distinct strains of COVID-19 already (Asian, European, and now one out of Texas), so my estimate of 5 strains in 5 years is probably wildly optimistic.
> Extrapolate the rate of infection in the US (<100K) to get to herd immunity (0.6 * 328M ~= 200M). It will take ~ 2000 days at the current pace.
That math assumes a linear infection rate. It's exponential. I wouldn't be surprised if we reached herd immunity about the time the vaccine becomes available.
When I look at the dual graphs of infections and deaths, I think of how people say the death rate isn't rising, but wonder if it's that simple.
I wonder if it is a temporary effect, where at first the decreasing age of new cases compensates for the increasing number of cases, but in a week or two, the latter will overcome the former.
Kind of like how the decreasing cases in NY and western Europe countered the increasing cases in other places for a time, but it was temporary.
Well, just look at how long flu/influenza ravaged humans until we got it down to a level where we hardly talk about it anymore (despite 6-digit global annual death tolls).
Depending on where you want to draw the line, you could say we never entered a post-pandemic period of the flu. But most of us act as if we did.
My only point being (which I since added to my original comment) that we certainly never entered a post-pandemic state for influenza given that it's so far a seasonal passenger of the human condition. Look at the Hong Kong influenza outbreak not long ago.
I would expect the legacy of covid19 to be more similar to that going forward than some permanent emergency state.
A thing I think is interesting is I can never remember having the actual flu. We got the stomach flu all the time as kids, and have gotten it yearly since having kids, and for most of that time I assumed that's what people meant by the flu. I can't remember ever actually catching influenza.
That sounds worse than delivery? I don't know what it's like in North America, but in the UK grocery delivery is pretty ubiquitous, not all companies everywhere, but someone everywhere, before this year & the coronavirus.
The people that didn't use it didn't by preference, and the surge in demand is the (maybe partially but not entirely, or perhaps entirely, open for debate) change in preference in the current climate, not that there's suddenly an availability of this concept that didn't exist before.
Nobody's worried that Ocado, or the online divisions of the major supermarkets, might disappear when we're all innoculated.
Does anyone know the rough market share of that US$7.2bn in June? Is Instacart really scaling that high, with their inefficient personal shopper approach, or is Walmart really killing it?
Additionally, to compare internationally, the UK reportedly spent US$15bn in the entire of 2018 compared to the US' ~$24bn. But the UK online grocery market is much more established - every major supermarket (except Lidl/Aldi) has direct warehouse to customer deliveries by van, in addition to Prime Now, Amazon Fresh, Ocado and others.
I'm struggling to reconcile the difference even accounting for the 5x population difference. Lived experience suggests that online grocery shopping throughout the UK is very prevalent but (perhaps until recently) was fairly atypical in most of the US. Possible explanations are the value of orders is greater in the US, or online grocery deliveries has a wider classification? Personally I don't use online grocery shopping in London most of the time as I live next to a supermarket. Is that perhaps more common than I realise?
> every major supermarket (except Lidl/Aldi) has direct warehouse to customer deliveries by van
While obviously an Ocado order comes from a warehouse built for this purpose all the high street supermarkets near me are delivering from their existing stores. The Sainsbury's I use at the moment because it's right down the road and huge (so I can shop every eight days to get everything with only one exposure) has a fleet of delivery vans based there.
Some also have "dark" stores that don't serve any walk-in customers but my impression is that they aren't cloning Ocado, even Waitrose (whose produce is sold by Ocado) would sell me stuff from the Waitrose near me, not a warehouse.
This probably isn't going to fly here but...I don't like online grocery shopping and hope that it never fully replaces grocery stores. I appreciate the increase in options for people who do want it, but it should never become the only option.
Things like fresh produce, dairy and meat I need to choose myself. Looking at pictures of these things on a website is not even close to the same thing. Each individual one of those things is different. They vary in quality and weight and to be honest, I don't really trust a grocery store clerk to examine these things for me.
Grocery delivery just creates yet another disconnect between us and where our food comes from. Grocery stores themselves are already fairly far removed from our food sources, but at least there we have the option to still examine our food and choose it before purchase
Food's become far too impersonal and inhuman as it is. It's one of the most important things for us(and a large majority of life out there). It should be respected and people should never forget where their food comes from.
The way we treat food production in general in modern times is pretty appalling as is. Continuing to remove people further from their food is a step in the wrong direction and just promotes yet more mass consolidation of production of food.
Eventually, it's going to cut out a ton of businesses in between, small food producers will suffer and large conglomerates selling bland homogenized crap will take over and globally supply the population with their mass produced delivered food.
A local butcher started doing delivery where I live and they deliver incredibly high quality meat. It’s been a revelation.
I combine that with two other sources for delivery: Costco via Instacart, which gets you all the bulk needs and some produce, basically you never have to worry about quality.
And then Amazon Fresh for cheap staples and pantry items. We have a really high quality vegetarian market too that delivers on Instacart.
If you do it wrong, you essentially will have a bad time. Amazon has horrible meat and not great produce, but Costco and the local butcher have amazing stuff.
I used to hate shopping for groceries online, but in all honesty it’s gotten quite good if you live in the right area and figure out good places to look. I’ve changed my mind.
How did you go about finding a local butcher, I’ve found locally that this isn’t like a thing where people have a large web presence & giant “this is where you should be buying meat” lit signs pointing the way
I always find the best local food sources from word of mouth. Usually there's not a large web presence because web is extra overhead, and high quality food has a much higher demand than supply so there's no need for it. A good place to meet local people to talk about food is a farmer's market.
I dunno, I guess I just think of things differently, when I move, the first thing I do is look for the local butchers, delis or produce shops, they've almost always got the best quality for price outside of farm fresh stuff. Bulk stuff is always a planned trip to scrounge all the best bulk sections around. Wandering into random food stores you find on your travels and discovering little stores selling spices or vegetables you've never seen before. Fighting with little old ladies over the best cheese in the Italian deli.
I enjoy that stuff. Food brings me joy. Finding and choosing the best ingredients for the stuff I make has always been something i've enjoyed. Well, once I learned to cook well enough that I came to appreciate it.
These things that come as revelations were always available to you. I may be being presumptuous to you and the other commenters, but it seems to be more that the change in routine and living situations has caused a lot of people to reassess their food in general.
These things are great and positive. I may just be overly pessimistic, but I worry for that everyone like you and the others, there's ten others who never think about it and continue on as is, in a more convenient and ever disconnected way.
I feel like there's a good way and bad way this could all play out. I guess I'm just most worried that rather than small local businesses getting their stuff out there, they'll get drowned out by the big players that are going to start dropping into this market hard. It could go either way. I just really don't want to see it got the big corporate route yet again.
Like you and others say, this is an opportunity for small local businesses to get out their and I have seen it first hand. At my current job I share space with a new small local organic produce delivery company and those are the kinds of people I'd like to see do well from this.
Well, in vancouver on commercial drive at the Santa Barbara is where I used to go. They get pretty ruthless. Or cioffi's on Hastings...but that place was bit more chill. Still always busy though.
I do miss the Italian deli that closed. It’s not that we don’t frequent the corner markets and farmers markets either! And again, the delivery we get is a small local butcher, and I imagine once things open up we’ll visit when we have time.
I think of online as replacing just the droll half, or when times in a pinch. The pantry items, milk. It saves time for trips to my favorite deli. No more DFW-commencement-speech Safeway coupon rush hour traffic jams. More time for the farmers market!
You sound like a nostalgic grandpa pining for the good old days that are passing, but to be honest, if anything the online half has opened up a lot of room for fun excursions in the real world. I share the hope that local businesses thrive as well. The Asian fish market ladies certainly know me better than before. One not need replace the other, but the optionality has made things dramatically better for me, at least.
I find that my interaction with food has changed in a pretty complex way. We have not spent a dollar on carry out or dining since February — what was once a spending category we budgeted on has gone to $0. We’ve been doing online grocery shopping and I’m not sure if we will go back. We have herb & tomato gardening going on and we’ve been making a big deal of it with my daughter, and I’m making our bread from bulk flour deliveries. And I just tried moving our meat purchasing out of grocery but we will see how that goes. I thought I’d feel more disconnected but as part of this whole reshuffling I find it more nuanced.
I used to think the same thing about needed to choose produce myself, but after doing Whole Foods delivery about 20 times since covid hit, I've had mostly great results with quality.
Maybe this is just Whole Foods, and maybe it's my area San Francisco, so YMMV with other stores in other locations.
I agree that I strongly prefer picking it out myself, but a lot of meat and produce would also stay fresher longer if it weren't on display (stored in basically suboptimal conditions) for hours and days. So there are some potential gains in food waste reduction that could offset that.
Think about how often people pick out some meat and then instead of putting it back, it sits on a shelf somewhere or by the register. Another anecdote is from when I had a CSA with my ex a few years ago and I was talking to the farmer. He said that he used to let people pick out things like tomatoes but switched to sorting it out himself. He'd start the day with basically 90%+ perfectly good tomatoes, and end the day with at least a third of it bruised and damaged from people picking and squeezing.
>I don't like online grocery shopping and hope that it never fully replaces grocery stores.
Your opinion is the exact opposite of mine. While I think it won't replace grocery stores, I do think it has brought more flexibility to the process.
As for respect, I've never considered food production and distribution anything other than another business type.
Luckily, a local farmer's market has no contact pick up, so we've been able to use it.
During the pandemic we've had everything as a no contact pickup or delivery. We've saved a great deal of time and actually spend less on groceries per month than we did in the past.
The only issue we have is sometimes items are out of stock by the time the pick up or delivery happens. Well, that and we panic bought industrial size toilet rolls due to FOMO. At least we have TP for the next year.
I agree with this so much. I’ve been doing grocery delivery this entire time and have revived my passion for cooking, but I am deeply frustrated by the process of selection.
To make good food you need good ingredients, and cost and brand are not valid proxies. I need to see, smell, touch to select and nothing has been able to replace that.
I’m hoping the disruption of supply chains will lead to a hyperlocal food revolution. I’ve been focused on eating local for a long time, but I’d love to see it spread. Part of that though is finding the producers and building relationships, being conscientious in how you source your ingredients. Buying online hides this all from you behind a narrative that may not match reality.
For those reasons, I really hope online doesn’t kill grocery. I’m lucky to have such a great local grocery chain, and I’m hoping they come out the other end of this strong.
If you really cook there's no way to separate the market shopping from the cooking. If I need tomatoes for sauce or I need them for slicing, that's two completely different criteria for tomatoes. Would I pay some rando to bring me a pound of peaches? Definitely not. I wouldn't even ask my wife to go get the peaches. Honestly, do not understand how produce shopping can happen online. Obviously you can order Rice Krispies or whatever.
My tactic during quarantine has been to order larger quantities of produce and then find recipes suitable for what I receive. I've also been trending towards root vegetables and citrus over other forms of produce, because the variability doesn't have as much impact on my cooking. All that said, you're absolutely right. When you are trying to make something specific you need just the right ingredients and the difference between two tomatoes or different apples can be critically important.
It's a natural progression for supermarkets. If you want to choose things yourself go to a small markets, farmer's markets, local butchers, greengrocers, bakery etc.
Like everything in life it depends. I started using a local online grocery delivery service last year. Before, I have to go to several small market and spend a few hours trying to find good vegetables and meat. The delivery service now does that and charge a bit higher than local rates. He does not own inventory but rather go to buy food from his trusted sources. The result is high quality vegetables/meat than I can get on my own and also delivered to my door the next day (or at the end of the day).
If you want to buy your own food yourself it'd help if you live somewhere gentrified. It would make sense to use your community and you only need to step out of your apartment's building to find the grocery and the bakery. But if you live 3-4 km from the nearest one, the delivery service is a life-saver.
> Things like fresh produce, dairy and meat I need to choose myself
The thing is, you don’t need to, you prefer to.
Plus if you’re buying meat at a grocery store, you’re already so removed from the source of your food that letting somebody else pick it out is like adding another inch to a marathon.
It won't. Besides, we already live in a world with in-store shopping only groceries, hybrid (where you can do both, like Whole Foods), and online-only (like Peapod or Schwan's, which has been around since well before "online" ordering was around).
There's not a lot to worry about. In-person/in-store grocery shopping is not going away but it will be complemented by online and online/offline grocery shopping. This is really the same path that so many other product verticals have taken in recent years and so it's really no surprise.
I totally agree. Personally, I'd like to grow as much food as I can in my own backyard and supplement it with grocery stores for things I can't produce myself.
I've got to say, that while FreshDirect has always been way more expensive than my local grocery store, Amazon Fresh has always been way cheaper. Waaay cheaper.
I live in New York City, and I manage to save about 40% on my grocery bill using Amazon Fresh. Whether it's crackers, nuts, chocolate, sausage, ice cream, whatever -- everything that's not extremely perishable is somewhere between 30% and 50% cheaper on Amazon. (I buy everything except fresh veggies, meat, dairy, eggs and bread on Amazon now.)
I like the experience of shopping at my local store. But when I see that spending $90 there turns into spending $55 at Amazon... it's pretty much a no-brainer. And I spend a half-hour walking at a park instead of walking around the aisles of a grocery store and waiting in line for ten minutes.
Just curious, does that 40% decrease include shipping costs? Or do you use Amazon Prime? I have often found that Amazon's initial prices are cheaper, but if you pay for shipping it comes out to about the same, sometimes more, than a local grocery store. I live in Michigan so that may be different than NYC.
Yeah I have Prime so Fresh shipping is free. I don't think I'd consider Fresh as an option at all without it. (But I already consider Prime to be worth it just for my regular Amazon purchases, so I don't really even factor it into the Fresh price.)
Lot of people here complaining that grocery delivery sucks because the shoppers pick bad produce.
That's because the current business models treat grocery shopping as unskilled labor.
I certainly don't think that picking a good peach or watermelon is an unskilled job. In fact any time my wife gets complex produce like that it sucks and I have stopped asking her to buy any produce. Spending an hour to go and pick some high quality food is a skill that, if you want it done right, will cost you some money.
This is possible to do as even fancy restaurants have employees who they trust to obtain the correct produce that they need. All it needs is a consistent shopper on a week-to-week basis (so they can learn what you want) and the willingness of the customer to pay appropriately.
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[ 5.5 ms ] story [ 216 ms ] threadWonder if this will last long enough for some people to decide they like home cooking more than taking out... (maybe they bought additional kitchen appliances, etc)
On the other hand once people have to return to the office they will have less discretionary time for cooking...
* August 2019, 16.1million monthly users, 1.2billion revenue
* March 2020, 39.5million monthly users, 4billion revenue
* June 2020, 45.6million monthly, 7.2billion revenue
Not sure how best to format on here, but this is apparently a high growth thing both before and during covid.
I'm curious what week by week data would look like.
It seems like a win-win for me. Does anyone have a counter to that?
It's also furthering the trend towards isolation, the segregation into precarious low-wage service jobs vs a feudal class mostly busy with co-ordinating this personal army of theirs. The latter can afford this because they have institutionalised power structures that have kept lower incomes flat for half a century while the tax structure was turned on its head, with the highest incomes now paying lower rates than day labourers.
One would assume that high-paying jobs somehow correlate with value generation. But when shit hit the fan, they were the first to be sent home for half a year and economists are still trying to find anyone who actually noticed that regional key-account managers were mostly just busy with creating funny zoom backgrounds.
Online sales obviously kill brick-and-mortar retail, which leads to whatever the opposite of a liveable city is.
Large companies tend to run more efficiently. Or, more accurately, they are wasteful in ways that do not have the side benefits of, say, a single-proprietor sponsoring some small-town event because that's "how it's done", or continuing to employ someone even when it's a bad business decision, because they have worked with them for a decade and feel a sense of responsibility.
They also heavily favour concentration of market share with just one or very few companies, who are more powerful in relation to customers, employees, and the state. While gains in efficiencies have so far dominated, the beneficiaries of this shift in power will at some point try to cash it in.
Other than that, it's pretty cool.
I don't get it. You think people were useless because when they went home, it didn't affect the economy. But you're talking about people who were and are theoretically working from home. So you seem to be begging the question. Am I missing something?
Also their produce choices were limited.
Instacart shoppers take much more care but they are very expensive and their lack of knowledge of in-store inventory means they make poor substitutions, requiring me to baby-sit the order while they pick it to veto substitutions.
I have returned to in-store shopping.
We're making up the delivery fee and tip by not eating out or going to the movies, and we see it as a small way to put some money into the hands of the essential workers keeping society afloat right now.
It’s like they’re not even trying. Or they are being completely oblivious to the dangers that they are the ones spreading this virus.
And since the spread has continued to rise, I’m wondering if the source of the spread is indeed inside of supermarkets. You have a relatively contained environment, where the air conditioning system can pick up the virus molecules in the air, and spread it around.
WHO say there is no evidence that asymptomatic carriers can spread the virus, and if you have the disease, people should stay indoors. Therefore the mask is redundant.
But wait, the CDC recommend (and where I live TfL have it mandatory) wearing a face mask, otherwise you're "killing grandma".
I've even seen plenty of articles suggesting that wearing the mask is making things worse, or that lockdowns are making things worse, etc.. The information overload is getting extreme.
So which is it?
I wouldn't be surprised if mixed messaging is the reason why people have given up caring.
Example: "Young people aren't affected.. wait, yes they are, wait.. umm wait no they're not"
Our global institutions having fundamental disagreements is so dangerous. I spend hours every day reading into this stuff and I don't have a clue what I'm supposed to do, so how is the Average Joe who just wants to get along with life supposed to know what the correct course of action is?
What if you're in the incubation period? AFAIK that doesn't count as being an "asymptomatic carrier" because you eventually show symptoms.
>I've even seen plenty of articles suggesting that wearing the mask is making things worse [...] The information overload is getting extreme.
Source for this? I've only heard of mask wearing making things worse by proxy (ie. you're depriving healthcare workers of masks). If that's the basis of those claims, it's totally consistent that masks are good and that masks are bad.
1) Are people correctly using masks - e.g. taking higher risks than the relative protection given by type of mask being used - just because you wear a bandana doesn't mean you should be hanging out in large crowds; properly wearing/fitting masks; properly disposing/sanitizing masks.
2) comparison of infection rates for other airborne/aerosol-transmitted diseases in countries/cultures where mask use is traditionally higher than the US, e.g. higher influenza infection rates in countries where mask use is traditionally much higher than US despite their success in containing COVID (taiwan, s. korea); comparison of sick rates of professionals who wear masks at work some of the time vs all day (Australian study of nurses, I think??); comparison of sick rates of people who wear veils when in public vs those that don't in same society.
Sorry for lack of source material, but armed with above one might be able to google it out if interested.
Personally, I'm starting to like wearing my largely ineffective-but-anonymizing sheer cloth mask in public. I wear a tight N95 on the plane, which sucks (effective PPE is NEVER comfortable to wear for hours), then junk it, but just try and tell me it doesn't help. I think smart monkeys should be staying home unless they have to be in public space. Strongly disagree with threatening jail time for mask noncompliance tho.
It also feels like you're happy to use some inconsistencies (real or imagined) as license to do whatever you feel like. Considering that only the most deranged lunatics would suggest that health care workers and scientists are actively trying to harm people for some reason, it's odd to pound on any opening they may give you, instead of engaging in a good-faith effort to understand the issues involved and do the bare minimum to protect yourself and your community.
Definitely not - my comment was written from a frustrated perspective. The mental exhaustion of keeping up with the latest guidelines, ingesting all these differing opinions and trying to work out what to do, is far more exhausting than reverting to our default state of not giving a fuck (or more accurately: hoping for the best).
It's _easier_ to stop caring, and given the virus isn't hurting young people as much, no wonder they're doing the calculus and choosing to go to the pub and get back to normal. I'd be lying if I said it wasn't tempting.
So, it's true that the WHO said that, although they've since clarified that by 'no evidence' they mean "we don't know", not "it doesn't happen". ('no evidence' is one of those phrases that people misunderstand). However, _pre-symptomatic_ cases are contagious, and there's no way to know if you're negative, asymptomatic, or pre-symptomatic, so as public health advice "asymptomatic people may not be contagious" is not useful (it's somewhat useful from and epidemiological standpoint).
> I've even seen plenty of articles suggesting that wearing the mask is making things worse
There were some early concerns that masks would make people act more riskily, but this doesn't seem to be the case.
> or that lockdowns are making things worse
Who claimed that?!
Look, in any emerging situation, there's a lot of confusion and uncertainty. But it now seems pretty clear that masks don't make things worse, and there's some reason to hope that they make things better. And they're cheap. So people should wear them.
I understand this, but curbing on fundamental freedoms based on "no evidence" is a hard sell for many of us. I have the luxury of playing it safe because I'm a remote working software engineer, but if I still worked in a shop like I did a few years ago I could be homeless now.
> Who claimed that?!
There was "reasonable" (reasonable looking) evidence that locked down states did worse numbers-wise, but this obviously doesn't control for population density. My point is that nobody knows what's going on anymore.
It sounds like you glided right over the difference between asymptomatic and pre-symptomatic. This seems crucial to the whole cloud of confusion that exists and is being promoted here.
Trying to be as charitable as possible, if you were sincere in saying
>The information overload is getting extreme. So which is it?
The contradiction appears to be directly due to misunderstanding of "asymptomatic" and the follow up comment tried to explain it.
I don't doubt this misunderstanding is widespread, but I don't know how to rectify it and it often seems as though people might be deliberately obtuse.
To be clear, right now, today, there is no way for you to know if you're asymptomatic, presymtomatic, or negative (unless you've had literally no human contact for a couple of weeks, in which case you can be confident that you're negative).
Risk of spreading the disease in this state:
Negative: None
Asymptomatic: Unknown
Presymptomatic: High
So for the average person in the street, it is essentially _irrelevant_ that we don't know what the risk is for asymptomatic spread; there is no practical way for them to know if they're asymptomatic or presymptomatic. It is an interesting question from an epidemiological point of view; if asymptomatic people can spread it easily, then that makes things worse. But as an individual, considering your risk of spreading it, it is irrelevant.
The risk to people working in grocery stores increases linearly (or faster) with the number of in-person grocery-store visits. The risk to the community is probably roughly quadratic in the number of in-person grocery-store visits.
Curbside pickup is a really responsible thing to do.
When I originally checked, there were a limited number of slots available at my local stores and they seemed to be all filled all the time. At one time at least, they were even queueing people up to shop on a website.
So telling me it is or isn't something I should do is irrelevant; I would need to think it was something I could do.
Today though it's amazing. I put together a grocery order at my convenience and place and pay via the app, and it just magically shows up at my door within a convenient time-frame. I don't have to answer the door, I don't have to talk to anyone, I don't have to sign a receipt. It just shows up.
That said, I miss shopping and to be honest, Instacart is both expensive and unreliable. I'll go back to in store once things die down, and I'm sure many others will too. Meaning, I think this is more of a spike than a long term trend.
I am enjoying being able to reflect through out the day, being able to add items to my cart anytime in the day or the next).
I like how much time and gas is saved. I don’t have to change from my pj’s in the weekend, so it reduces some physical and mental overload as well! It’s been an unbelievable boon for me, and it’s worth every extra penny that delivery costs.
I'm also brand new to cooking and baking, and never really "shopped" at a grocery store in any meaningful sense, so all the things I'm buying from instacart are first-time purchases. I've never made a grocery shopping list. This is all new to me.
I'm having an exact mix of both of your experiences.
I just expect that about 10% of the order will be wrong somehow. I'm sure it's very annoying if you're shopping on a budget, but given that I'm learning to cook and bake and make use of whatever is around, precision isn't super important to me for most items.
I'm also using instacart as my shopping list, which is great, but it's a shopping list tied to one specific store, which is less great.
Here's some free advice for instacart's product team:
* Let me set all items in my order to "no substitutions" and toggle it on for items I absolutely can't be without. Or toggle "all substitutions" and don't nag me to approve each one as they happen. This is the most annoying part of interacting with the app. Just add a "mark all as no substitution" button in your next build, please, I know you can do it quickly.
* Help me shop better. Your "Explore" interface is laughably bad. Cart management is hard. I don't have a solution for you here, other than do it better. Browsing large stores on a mobile device is hard, but this is what you should be working to solve. Improve the UI of shopping as a whole. Spend some innovation tokens here. What you should be trying to do is help me map the universe of products in a way that lets me express my preferences, so you already know which items I consider acceptable substitutes. With enough people doing that, you have seriously valuable ML data. Once you know what I want to buy and what realistic substitution preferences are, you should be shopping for me across every store in my area to find the best overall deal for my cart that fits my requirements.
* Why is the shopper texting me at all? Using the service makes me feel like I'm tethered to my phone or I'm a bad person. If I don't stay connected, your shopper is going to be stressed about my order, and I'm going to end up getting the wrong thing. Your goal should be to remove anxiety from using your service, not increase it by keeping me tethered to my device while I'm visualizing someone else plucking items off the shelves. I've had 1 shopper that didn't text me at all and we communicated entirely through the "approve/deny" substitution buttons, which was still annoying, but less bad than the messages I get from other shoppers.
* WTF is with your fee structure? The app tells me the prices are higher than in-store AND there's a service fee AND there's a tip. This shouldn't be so complicated. I want to see "cost of items in store - cost of items on instacart", "amount paid to shopper", and "amount paid to instacart". The item cost can be savings or marked up due to increase demand or heavy weight or whatever, just be honest about the actual difference between going to the store and ordering on instacart. I know instacart should be paid, just show how many dollars go to paying instacart. I know the shopper is getting paid something already, show me how much, so I can tip accordingly, and you'll probably see a dramatic increase in tips.
Instacart is one of the more broken products that I use because it still delivers value. I get that they'll survive without fixing any of the stuff above, but it's a shame to see the opportunity wasted to build something really great.
While I'm happy people have affordable, convenient, and socially distanced access to food, most of what is in the Walmart grocery section are things I wouldn't personally consider food.
Found it. "Wal-Mart, for example, says a majority of its fresh offerings are enhanced with a 6 to 12 percent solution of water, salt, sodium phosphate and natural flavorings."
I know someone whose go-to for organic stuff is Wal-Mart, because she lives in a somewhat rural area without a lot of options, and Wal-Mart is actually the best.
It's better now but the one time I used grocery delivery a long while back (Peapod) because I had a broken foot and had trouble doing a full grocery shopping, it was better than the alternatives but still lacking. I would usually still end up going to the grocery store but that was OK so long as I just needed to put a few items into a shoulder bag.
I can't stand Instacart but I begrudgingly use it (for now) because it's the safer option for everyone involved. I also haven't forgotten that they were stealing shoppers' tips for a long time.
Once this is over I'll never use it again.
Some stores have senior/at risk hours but then there are some that are open to general public.
I'm not sure what your circumstance is (you might be at-risk for covid-19 complications), but I think a lot of people have been doing the same thing, and I wonder if the risk of going to the grocery store is really so high that it's worth stressing over. Edit: I don't mean go be stupid about it, but between the time you're in the store, people keeping apart and wearing masks, and the lack of news about grocery store outbreaks, it doesn't seem that risky to me.
Ordinarily I love grocery shopping but after having done online for several months now, I’m not sure I’ll go back. I imagine I’ll order the bulk of the items online, and visit the specialty / small grocers to pick out the odds and ends that are special.
Farm boxes are great too, for organic produce (and growing a garden!).
Agree on the farm boxes - had one of those and we were overloaded with produce. Bit expensive but once you taste fresh carrots it's hard to go back to store bought.
I've had no problem filling my cart and getting a delivery time any time I want. There were some "delivery windows are full" problems early in the pandemic, but no problems now.
Most sites I use make it easy to re-order past purchases so I can get my shopping done in 5 minutes most weeks.
Now they pretty much all have it scaled. But I could imagine some places don’t, especially cities with surging cases and new lockdowns.
By doing pickup, you get pretty good convenience (almost as good as delivery), great pricing, and somewhat limited selection (but always reflected in-app at order time, rather than surprising you at pickup time). That's a tradeoff that works for me.
A few months ago you could only order restaurant-sized quantities of things (like minimum 25 lbs of bananas), but they've since started making more items available in "family friendly" sizes (3 lbs bananas, $1.80).
(They do have a $20-off your first order referral promotion I'll mention [3] in case you want to try it, but I'm just a happy customer who wants to see the concept take off.)
[1] https://www.gocheetah.com/
[2] https://techcrunch.com/2020/04/28/cheetah-a-restaurant-whole...
[3] Enter referral code "2EA2666F" at sign-up or https://cheetah.onelink.me/j187/7b49398d
(Controversial) protip: home made salsa makes a better pasta sauce than home made pasta sauce
Only happened once, but still they have work to do.
not sure if post-pandemic will be a thing
What's the difference?
So what is it that I'm missing here? What grand changes in the way we live are we expecting in "post-pandemic" world?
Some bar owners seem very upset, to the point where they are equating closing bars with denying their right to exist and make a living and suing the government.
If social distancing remains in effect, post-pandemic world would have much lower density in offices/restaurants/other large gathering locations with seating, increasing real estate costs, which will be passed onto the consumer.
If social distancing is required on transportation as well, this would dramatically increase air travel costs. Not only would this require heavy rethinking in any locale which relies on tourism, but also for any conferences/conventions which have a large international attendee component, perhaps requiring a reduction in scope, or being cancelled completely as the economics no longer makes sense.
In-patient hospital costs will also rise as patients can no longer be placed close to each other. Number of tele-medicine providers will rise, and how this will affect the quality of care will have to be seen.
You can do a quick test before boarding an international flight and permitted to enter the country only if you're healthy. Contact tracing apps can easily show Green-Red passes to prove whether you can enter any restaurant, shop, hospital, etc.
Contact tracing only works for you if every person you’ve been in contact with is willing to participate. And that assumes you actually know all of the people you’ve spent enough time around to be considered to have contacted them.
Just curious, how do anticipate this working from a business point of view? If boarding is denied due to a positive test, does the passenger get a refund? If that's the case, won't airlines overbook significantly more than they do today, which in turn will probably increase chaos? On the other hand, if tickets are non-refundable, who would gamble on purchasing an expensive ticket and then be subject to losing it due to a semi-inaccurate test?
It will take ~ 2000 days at the current pace.
New strains of the coronavirus come out once a year, so we should expect COVID-19[a-e] to arrive before we hit herd immunity on COVID-19.
Hopefully they won’t be as bad as the current strain, but history says they’ll be more transmissible and/or more deadly.
Also, it sounds like there are three distinct strains of COVID-19 already (Asian, European, and now one out of Texas), so my estimate of 5 strains in 5 years is probably wildly optimistic.
That math assumes a linear infection rate. It's exponential. I wouldn't be surprised if we reached herd immunity about the time the vaccine becomes available.
Still looks exponential to me
I wonder if it is a temporary effect, where at first the decreasing age of new cases compensates for the increasing number of cases, but in a week or two, the latter will overcome the former.
Kind of like how the decreasing cases in NY and western Europe countered the increasing cases in other places for a time, but it was temporary.
Depending on where you want to draw the line, you could say we never entered a post-pandemic period of the flu. But most of us act as if we did.
But this is interesting: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline_of_influenza
My only point being (which I since added to my original comment) that we certainly never entered a post-pandemic state for influenza given that it's so far a seasonal passenger of the human condition. Look at the Hong Kong influenza outbreak not long ago.
I would expect the legacy of covid19 to be more similar to that going forward than some permanent emergency state.
The people that didn't use it didn't by preference, and the surge in demand is the (maybe partially but not entirely, or perhaps entirely, open for debate) change in preference in the current climate, not that there's suddenly an availability of this concept that didn't exist before.
Nobody's worried that Ocado, or the online divisions of the major supermarkets, might disappear when we're all innoculated.
And you get lower prices.
Does anyone know the rough market share of that US$7.2bn in June? Is Instacart really scaling that high, with their inefficient personal shopper approach, or is Walmart really killing it?
Additionally, to compare internationally, the UK reportedly spent US$15bn in the entire of 2018 compared to the US' ~$24bn. But the UK online grocery market is much more established - every major supermarket (except Lidl/Aldi) has direct warehouse to customer deliveries by van, in addition to Prime Now, Amazon Fresh, Ocado and others.
I'm struggling to reconcile the difference even accounting for the 5x population difference. Lived experience suggests that online grocery shopping throughout the UK is very prevalent but (perhaps until recently) was fairly atypical in most of the US. Possible explanations are the value of orders is greater in the US, or online grocery deliveries has a wider classification? Personally I don't use online grocery shopping in London most of the time as I live next to a supermarket. Is that perhaps more common than I realise?
While obviously an Ocado order comes from a warehouse built for this purpose all the high street supermarkets near me are delivering from their existing stores. The Sainsbury's I use at the moment because it's right down the road and huge (so I can shop every eight days to get everything with only one exposure) has a fleet of delivery vans based there.
Some also have "dark" stores that don't serve any walk-in customers but my impression is that they aren't cloning Ocado, even Waitrose (whose produce is sold by Ocado) would sell me stuff from the Waitrose near me, not a warehouse.
1. Tesco was a pioneer in the sector, they really did push it all forward.
2. The grocery sector is much more competitive in the UK. Although Tesco is big it is nowhere near the dominance of Walmart in the US.
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Things like fresh produce, dairy and meat I need to choose myself. Looking at pictures of these things on a website is not even close to the same thing. Each individual one of those things is different. They vary in quality and weight and to be honest, I don't really trust a grocery store clerk to examine these things for me.
Grocery delivery just creates yet another disconnect between us and where our food comes from. Grocery stores themselves are already fairly far removed from our food sources, but at least there we have the option to still examine our food and choose it before purchase
Food's become far too impersonal and inhuman as it is. It's one of the most important things for us(and a large majority of life out there). It should be respected and people should never forget where their food comes from.
The way we treat food production in general in modern times is pretty appalling as is. Continuing to remove people further from their food is a step in the wrong direction and just promotes yet more mass consolidation of production of food.
Eventually, it's going to cut out a ton of businesses in between, small food producers will suffer and large conglomerates selling bland homogenized crap will take over and globally supply the population with their mass produced delivered food.
I combine that with two other sources for delivery: Costco via Instacart, which gets you all the bulk needs and some produce, basically you never have to worry about quality.
And then Amazon Fresh for cheap staples and pantry items. We have a really high quality vegetarian market too that delivers on Instacart.
If you do it wrong, you essentially will have a bad time. Amazon has horrible meat and not great produce, but Costco and the local butcher have amazing stuff.
I used to hate shopping for groceries online, but in all honesty it’s gotten quite good if you live in the right area and figure out good places to look. I’ve changed my mind.
I enjoy that stuff. Food brings me joy. Finding and choosing the best ingredients for the stuff I make has always been something i've enjoyed. Well, once I learned to cook well enough that I came to appreciate it.
These things that come as revelations were always available to you. I may be being presumptuous to you and the other commenters, but it seems to be more that the change in routine and living situations has caused a lot of people to reassess their food in general.
These things are great and positive. I may just be overly pessimistic, but I worry for that everyone like you and the others, there's ten others who never think about it and continue on as is, in a more convenient and ever disconnected way.
I feel like there's a good way and bad way this could all play out. I guess I'm just most worried that rather than small local businesses getting their stuff out there, they'll get drowned out by the big players that are going to start dropping into this market hard. It could go either way. I just really don't want to see it got the big corporate route yet again.
Like you and others say, this is an opportunity for small local businesses to get out their and I have seen it first hand. At my current job I share space with a new small local organic produce delivery company and those are the kinds of people I'd like to see do well from this.
Where can I do this?
I do miss the Italian deli that closed. It’s not that we don’t frequent the corner markets and farmers markets either! And again, the delivery we get is a small local butcher, and I imagine once things open up we’ll visit when we have time.
I think of online as replacing just the droll half, or when times in a pinch. The pantry items, milk. It saves time for trips to my favorite deli. No more DFW-commencement-speech Safeway coupon rush hour traffic jams. More time for the farmers market!
You sound like a nostalgic grandpa pining for the good old days that are passing, but to be honest, if anything the online half has opened up a lot of room for fun excursions in the real world. I share the hope that local businesses thrive as well. The Asian fish market ladies certainly know me better than before. One not need replace the other, but the optionality has made things dramatically better for me, at least.
Has this is water become so widely known that we can simply reference it in conversation like this?
I'm really glad I'm not actually a nostalgic grandpa at 30...I feel like i would probably have made some pretty poor life choices along the way.
Maybe this is just Whole Foods, and maybe it's my area San Francisco, so YMMV with other stores in other locations.
Think about how often people pick out some meat and then instead of putting it back, it sits on a shelf somewhere or by the register. Another anecdote is from when I had a CSA with my ex a few years ago and I was talking to the farmer. He said that he used to let people pick out things like tomatoes but switched to sorting it out himself. He'd start the day with basically 90%+ perfectly good tomatoes, and end the day with at least a third of it bruised and damaged from people picking and squeezing.
Your opinion is the exact opposite of mine. While I think it won't replace grocery stores, I do think it has brought more flexibility to the process.
As for respect, I've never considered food production and distribution anything other than another business type.
Luckily, a local farmer's market has no contact pick up, so we've been able to use it.
During the pandemic we've had everything as a no contact pickup or delivery. We've saved a great deal of time and actually spend less on groceries per month than we did in the past.
The only issue we have is sometimes items are out of stock by the time the pick up or delivery happens. Well, that and we panic bought industrial size toilet rolls due to FOMO. At least we have TP for the next year.
To make good food you need good ingredients, and cost and brand are not valid proxies. I need to see, smell, touch to select and nothing has been able to replace that.
I’m hoping the disruption of supply chains will lead to a hyperlocal food revolution. I’ve been focused on eating local for a long time, but I’d love to see it spread. Part of that though is finding the producers and building relationships, being conscientious in how you source your ingredients. Buying online hides this all from you behind a narrative that may not match reality.
For those reasons, I really hope online doesn’t kill grocery. I’m lucky to have such a great local grocery chain, and I’m hoping they come out the other end of this strong.
If you want to buy your own food yourself it'd help if you live somewhere gentrified. It would make sense to use your community and you only need to step out of your apartment's building to find the grocery and the bakery. But if you live 3-4 km from the nearest one, the delivery service is a life-saver.
The thing is, you don’t need to, you prefer to.
Plus if you’re buying meat at a grocery store, you’re already so removed from the source of your food that letting somebody else pick it out is like adding another inch to a marathon.
It won't. Besides, we already live in a world with in-store shopping only groceries, hybrid (where you can do both, like Whole Foods), and online-only (like Peapod or Schwan's, which has been around since well before "online" ordering was around).
There's not a lot to worry about. In-person/in-store grocery shopping is not going away but it will be complemented by online and online/offline grocery shopping. This is really the same path that so many other product verticals have taken in recent years and so it's really no surprise.
I live in New York City, and I manage to save about 40% on my grocery bill using Amazon Fresh. Whether it's crackers, nuts, chocolate, sausage, ice cream, whatever -- everything that's not extremely perishable is somewhere between 30% and 50% cheaper on Amazon. (I buy everything except fresh veggies, meat, dairy, eggs and bread on Amazon now.)
I like the experience of shopping at my local store. But when I see that spending $90 there turns into spending $55 at Amazon... it's pretty much a no-brainer. And I spend a half-hour walking at a park instead of walking around the aisles of a grocery store and waiting in line for ten minutes.
That's because the current business models treat grocery shopping as unskilled labor.
I certainly don't think that picking a good peach or watermelon is an unskilled job. In fact any time my wife gets complex produce like that it sucks and I have stopped asking her to buy any produce. Spending an hour to go and pick some high quality food is a skill that, if you want it done right, will cost you some money.
This is possible to do as even fancy restaurants have employees who they trust to obtain the correct produce that they need. All it needs is a consistent shopper on a week-to-week basis (so they can learn what you want) and the willingness of the customer to pay appropriately.