The delivery shoppers are especially bad at whole foods. There really must be a critical mass where having a grocery warehouse makes more sense than these people meandering around.

There is actually. I used to work in grocery e-commerce. The model is pickers in a store --> a "dark store" that looks more like a home Depot with only pickers, not open to public --> warehouse like environment with various levels of automation.

This was a bit before the model of having Uber driver type delivery though. I am guessing that having the deliverers be close to the deliverees make it more economical to keep them in stores until a larger scale is reached. The dark store+ model was also predicated on a more factory floor like environment with only FTEs present. Think pallets moving about among the pickers- not too hard to work around IMHO but maybe the lawyers and insurers feel differently.

I still feel the overreaching factor is that in dense urban centers there is no cheap commercial/industrial space that is also in close proximity to customers.

See Ocado, although things aren't going so well for them at the moment.

Yep, my local Amazon Fresh store felt like it was already a distribution center with the cold fluorescent lighting, gray shelves and gray concrete floors.