| ▲ | mosura 2 days ago |
| Sounds like they just put them in the wrong places. > Fenyo added that Kroger’s decision to locate the Ocado centers outside of cities turned out to be a key flaw. > “Ultimately those were hard places to make this model work,” said Fenyo. “You didn’t have enough people ordering, and you had a fair amount of distance to drive to get the orders to them. And so ultimately, these large centers were just not processing enough orders to pay for all that technology investment you had to make.” |
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| ▲ | jlarocco 2 days ago | parent | next [-] |
| But I think in the cities Kroger grocery stores serve as the fulfilment centers, so they don't need robotic ones. There's probably still room for automation, but it might have to be different than warehouse automation. |
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| ▲ | michaelt 2 days ago | parent | next [-] | | It depends on your business model. If a basket of groceries brought online costs $15 more than the in-store prices, then you can pick in-store profitably, very easy. That's the instacart model. But if a basket of groceries brought online costs about the same as buying in-store? With the retailer bearing the costs of picking, packing and delivery instead of the customer? Well then you need something more efficient than a store. | | |
| ▲ | cudgy 2 days ago | parent | next [-] | | Even $15 more isn’t enough on account of delivery time, transpo costs, driver time, picking items, and bagging. Current model is for drivers to subsidize by being tricked into taking unprofitable orders. | | |
| ▲ | michaelt 2 days ago | parent | next [-] | | If Kroger operates the same was as Ocado does in the UK, then the drivers are paid by the hour, with the company providing the van and fuel. Agree a lot of modern delivery businesses involve "self-employed" drivers getting paid a pittance and using their own vehicle and fuel, though. | |
| ▲ | mothballed 2 days ago | parent | prev [-] | | From what I've seen, for grocery the model is they'll give you the least desirable or near expired stock that the walk-in customers won't grab. So they're basically saving spoilage. This happens so reliably I'm absolutely convinced this is how they 'pay' for it without raising prices. I've also noticed this with hardware stores like Lowes. If I place a pickup order they more often than not will pawn off on me their broken, returned, or even used and damaged stock. Items like building wrap will have soil and rips on it, concrete mix will be spoiled from moisture, lumber will be all the most warped pieces (if you don't order a whole pallet, expect every last piece of fractional pallet will be knotted to hell, split, twisted, and badly warped), plumbing valves will be open package and leaky, etc etc. It's like clockwork, even if the stock sitting on the shelf doesn't have these problems. Due to this there are some stores I will never do a pickup/delivery order from. | | |
| ▲ | gambiting 2 days ago | parent [-] | | Here in the UK it's common for online grocery sites to say "fresh for at least X days" on every item, so bread will usually say 5 days, eggs 7 days etc etc. Doesn't matter if I select collection(so someone is picking those items for me at the store) or delivery(so they come from a larger warehouse). They stick to that promise. | | |
| ▲ | NegativeLatency 2 days ago | parent [-] | | An example of my experiences: you’ll get the apple with the bruise and maybe some damage instead of the nice one you’d pick out if you’re shopping for yourself. | | |
| ▲ | bloak 2 days ago | parent | next [-] | | That's my experience, too. Also the dented tin and the miniature mango. And, if the order is arriving at 10pm, the salad best before midnight. | |
| ▲ | kakacik 2 days ago | parent | prev [-] | | A counter-example - with a weekly shopping list way too long (family of 4), its hard for the husband to pick up all items as fresh as possible and do all necessary checks on each of them. Or in other words - even people themselves do make same mistake, I certainly do. | | |
| ▲ | VLM a day ago | parent [-] | | People will forgive themselves for saving money, but will not forgive others at the delivery service for charging extra. There is no delivery service that's cheaper and good enough, or dirt cheap and expected to be awful, but those are large profitable retail operations. The only sector offered is more expensive, which annoys people if they occasionally get a below average item while also paying a lot more. Delivery is for people who buy tenderloin not ground chuck and they get MAD when their tenderloin isn't perfect. |
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| ▲ | lotsofpulp 2 days ago | parent | prev [-] | | And how about charging more in store than online? On two separate occasions, I stopped by Walmart recently and spent $0.50 extra and $1.50 extra by walking in, going to the aisle, and picking up the item myself. The Walmart app even tells you that the price on the app is only for online orders. But I didn’t want to wait for an unknown amount of time for a Walmart employee to bring it out to my car (been more than 10 to 15min a few times). So basically, I pay extra to avoid that volatility in time to run that errand, and I do more work for it. | | |
| ▲ | ssl-3 2 days ago | parent | next [-] | | Yep. Wal-Mart has been that way for years now. I rarely shop at Wal-Mart. There's only a few things that I buy there. One of those things is motor oil: Their online pricing for 5 quarts of full-synthetic whatever is usually impossible to beat. The only catch is that you have to go to the store, park outside, and wait for someone to bring it out. Going inside the store to buy it in person often costs several dollars more (and those dollars count towards the next cheeseburger). It seems completely asinine for it to be this way, and I feel completely silly waiting outside for someone to bring me a single jug of motor oil and hand it to me through my car window, but it's very clear that they don't want me in the store. And I'm cheap. So I play their game and let them do it for me. (It's usually very fast for me, so there's that.) | |
| ▲ | sejje 2 days ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | I'm not sure they want us in the store anymore. And I'm glad to stay outside. | |
| ▲ | reaperducer a day ago | parent | prev [-] | | And how about charging more in store than online? I find your Wal-Mart anecdote interesting, because the chain supermarket that I use is the exact opposite. I buy the same items from the same store every two weeks (then supplement at neighborhood stores). Sometimes I shop in-store, and sometimes I get delivery. But the two-week shopping list is so unchanging that I even use the shopping list on the delivery web site when I'm walking through the aisles. Because of this, I notice that the supermarket charges more for products being delivered than those retrieved in-store. Sometimes it's enough that I'll text my wife a picture of the price tag in the store, followed by a screenshot from the store's delivery web site. Recently from memory, a 12-pack of ginger ale was about $3 more for delivery than in the store. But I'd say overall, probably 80% of the items I buy regularly are cheaper in the store. These days, I only get things delivered if I have other significant obligations that warrant paying a 10% delivery markup, plus the delivery fee, plus a tip. I think the price discrepancy between in-store and delivery is the reason that so many supermarkets I've been to recently (and also Macy's) have zero cell phone service under their roofs. |
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| ▲ | Animats 2 days ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | Using a retail store for fulfillment means orders are accepted for items that are out of stock. the ordering system doesn't have reliable inventory info. Then the customer gets a partial shipment. This is the curse of Safeway grocery ordering. | |
| ▲ | sct202 2 days ago | parent | prev [-] | | Kroger placed one of the sites in Orlando to also service Tampa and Jacksonville when they have 0 regular stores in the entire state. They were trying to use it to expand into the area, but I never saw very much in terms of advertising or promotions to drive demand but it could have also been that the robots were so bad that they couldn't attempt to market and push volume. | | |
| ▲ | easton a day ago | parent [-] | | I lived in Jacksonville for most of my life, and near the end of my tenure I started noticing the Kroger trucks. They were coming all the way from Orlando? That's like a two hour drive for cold groceries, feels expensive. (i do recall the chatter that this was their way to compete with publix, although I don't know anyone who actually used it.) |
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| ▲ | georgefrowny 2 days ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| I idly wonder if what would actually make sense here is a hybrid model that combines a gigantic fulfillment center with tens of thousands of products located "far" from people, with a large physical footprint and near to road/rail arteries, but with a mid-bandwidth, high-granularity, low-latency physical link to "near" places. For example, imagine you had an upscaled pneumatic tube system (don't get hung up on the exact implementation, it could be a small gauge train system or conveyer belt: whatever floats your Factorio-addled boat) with a diameter around, say, half a metre to a metre, packed goods into canisters and shot into town where they pop out at local distribution centres for pickup or last-mile delivery. This is where I thought the Boring Company might be going back before it was obvious it was an anti-public transit gambit. Possibly the curse of rail systems applies where the maintenance of the track (tube) costs so much that it's cheaper to fly (done delivery) or drive all the way on public roads (current solution). The advantage over rail is that the land footprint is very small: the tract is about a metre wide and can be buried if needed. Perhaps it's just not really different enough to trucking it all into town using semi trailers, which would still be required for large items and especially construction materials. Then again, even if this hare-brained system were to work, this assumes we actually want to continue to reduce most human commercial interactions to gigantic, remote, anonymous capital-intensive megasystems producing pods that pop out of the ground into robotic vending stations. |
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| ▲ | MattExact a day ago | parent | next [-] | | This is pretty much exactly what Ocado already do, at least in the UK. They have 4 CFCs and 15-20 "spokes". | |
| ▲ | pjc50 a day ago | parent | prev [-] | | Buried anything is just horrendously expensive. Partly because of other things that are already buried. | | |
| ▲ | georgefrowny a day ago | parent [-] | | Sure, but "we're going to cut the costs of horizontal drilling to a tiny fraction" was the Boring Company's original stated goal. And not all of it does need to be underground. Even if it was a good idea (which I doubt, it's just a idle thought), I don't think there's a practical way to retrofit such a system in existing cities due to the costs, planning and presumably private funding for a non-public network, because the public road system exists, needs to continue to exist for large items and can be used for virtually free in comparison. So if/when the depot-to-neighbourhood leg is automated, it's much more likely we'll see drone vehicles on the road or occasionally in the air instead of dedicated pipeline-like delivery systems. Even without the pipeline, you can conceive of self-diving heavy vehicles pulling up next to local delivery hubs and disgorging thousands of shipping pods into a robotic receiver. From there they either get picked up, droned, Starship'ed, cycled, whatever to the eventual front door. It's still possible just having then self-drive right to the door would turn out cheaper. Sounds very sterile as an experience, but really it's only an optimisation of the small, but highly distributed, remaining segment of inefficiency in the existing global machine that already converts raw materials to a widget or food and gets it to within 100 miles of your house. | | |
| ▲ | tstrimple a day ago | parent [-] | | > Sure, but "we're going to cut the costs of horizontal drilling to a tiny fraction" was the Boring Company's original stated goal. Sounds like the sort of idea a con man would pitch. Oh wait... | | |
| ▲ | georgefrowny a day ago | parent [-] | | To be fair, he did do that for kilos to orbit via reusable rocket, so there was a moment when everyone went "hmm maybe there is a TBM equivalent of the Falcon 9". But presumably it turned out that actually Herrenknecht and Hitachi aren't stupid, whereas, say, Boeing had been leaving opportunity for radical cost reduction on the table. | | |
| ▲ | marcosdumay a day ago | parent [-] | | There existed a well known path for reducing costs to orbit, and the market was non-competitive and highly non-optimized for decades. One single company made a single experiment in that path, and it was somewhere on the middle between success and failure. That's not the case for drilling. The Boring Company has no clear proposition about how they would reduce their costs. |
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| ▲ | tverbeure 2 days ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| They literally went too far… |
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| ▲ | rcxdude 2 days ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| Yeah, because arguably the main advantage of Ocado's warehouse is that it's extremely dense: you can pack a lot of storage in a very small area and still access it reasonably efficiently. But this only matters if space is at a premium, like near towns and cities (and for low-margin deliveries, you want your drivers to not have to go very far to your customers). |
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| ▲ | 2 days ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
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| ▲ | monero-xmr 2 days ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| “Never underestimate the bandwidth of a station wagon full of tapes hurtling down the highway” In the AI analogy, never underestimate the productivity of a human when dealing with a giant pile of groceries. You can throw all the AI and robots you can at something but sometimes a $20 an hour human picking from stacks of goods and produce simply destroys it in raw economics |
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