I will say this - at least in my local bay area Whole Foods, which I know isn't instacart anymore; there are the online shopper order fillers, they work IN the store but clearly not FOR the store.
I'm going to sound like a huge snob, but it makes the in-store shopping experience much less pleasant. The actual whole food workers are always there for you and go out of their way to help you, I don't expect the online shopper order fillers to help me, but they at best DGAF about the in-store shoppers and at worst are hostile towards them.
They speed past people and around corners with carts, cut in line at the fruits and veggies, ask WF employees to help them find items while you've waited to talk to them and in return, flat out ignore actual in-store shoppers when they ask for help. If you're out of the tech loop and don't realize that they are incentivized to fill orders, you might think the online shopper fillers are part of the WF staff there to help you. Knowing this, it's not too jarring to me to see a customer go up to one of them and have their many 'excuse me's just ignored, not even acknowledged.
They need shirts that say don't ask me for help; I know the way they are incentivized to fill as many orders is what creates this behavior - that needs to be looked at as well in my opinion.
During my last few trips to Safeway and Whole Foods I estimated about 50-75% of shoppers were delivery app drivers. I know the SF experience isn't typical, but it was still mind boggling.
Resistance to it doesn't have to be snobbish either. The entire grocery business model today is designed for people shopping for themselves. Stores occupy the largest and most expensive retail spaces in the center of the neighborhood. There are wide aisles, fancy decor and complex layouts to showcase products and keep people inside. I love going to the grocery store without a list or any agenda and coming out with a new interesting dinner option, buying loaves of bread on impulse because they just came out of the oven and smell great, talking to the butcher about fresh cuts of meat, getting a recommendation for a new wine or cheese to try out. Like myself I imagine grocery shopping is as much a hobby as bare necessity for others as well.
If delivery becomes a norm then none of this will exist anymore (at least at an affordable price). Grocery stores will just be large warehouses outside the city optimized for serving pre-decided orders as quickly and efficiently as possible.
I was just thinking about this. You would think that some of the grocery suppliers would get wise to the fact that these customer bases need drastically different experiences.
A consumer grocery shopper wants like with like (including in multiple locations. e.g. I want chili powder in the spice aisle, and with the mexican food), lots of variety, things organized by price. etc...
A food order picker wants something that looks like an ikea warehouse. Pick items x,y,z from bins a,b,c in aisle 3. They could probably care less if like is with like, as long as there is an easy way to find substitutes. They want to work with a bunch of people that are 'on a mission' like they are. And not have to deal with people like me who read the marketing copy on each type of Newman's pasta sauce.
Hey - It's me, your friendly supermarket supply chain guy! (I now consult on this stuff)
Picking in store has a huge number of cost base efficiencies compared to using a 'dark store'. These are as follows:
* Reduced property costs and property overhead.
* Having 5 vans in 300 locations is better than having 300 vans in 5 locations from a transport perspective (you get much closer to the customer, or have to tranship through hubs).
* Depending on locale, store workers may have more relaxed terms and conditions and unionisation than industrial warehouse workers, which 'warehouse' workers may get dependent on setup.
* Every darkstore you have needs to be fully stocked. This isn't so much of an issue with long-life products, but is an issue with fresh products that need to be sold before their expiry. A darkstore has a 'minimum viable size' with these fresh products dependent on the range you want to offer. Bigger darkstore with more customers means a bigger range - but you are also further away from the customer so either you have a bigger stem distance or need to do trunking to hubs and tranship from there.
So it's not about getting wise, trust me we think about these things and will model what is the most optimum way to deliver, at least in the UK :) An incredibly rough rule-of-thumb of logistics in the UK is that 1/3 of your money is spent on transport, 1/3 is spent on warehouse labour and 1/3 is spent on fixed costs (building, rent, utilities, equipment) - so your saving on labour has to be significant to pull back the fixed cost benefit of running out of an existing retail estate.
This is in the UK - most supermarkets have their own in-store pickers and will deliver with vans in the back. We have one company (Occado) that has a few large DC's and will tranship to outbases with vans. Some supermarkets have these dedicated 'darkstore' facilities in super-dense areas (e.g. Tesco, Asda), but they don't work in most areas of the country and in most cases are actually more expensive to run than in-store picking operations (they are done for capacity reasons rather than cost reasons).
The advantages of the centralised approach tend actually to be about service. If I can centralise to a big enough warehouse, I can offer a better range and offer things like visibility of expiry dates.
Something tells me that online grocery shopping may evolve into this format- for the reasons pointed out, it doesn’t make a ton of sense long term for these two formats to be bundled once there’s enough demand for both (which at this point, it seems like there is). These seems to be what Amazon Fresh is doing.
Exactly. Like segregation of B2B and B2C traffic and route them through servers that have different SLA and capabilities.
I guess the current model where couriers shop at the retail store is a result of hacking up an MVP. It’s very inefficient at scale. Once the grocery stores and retailers deeply integrate with the delivery companies a more efficient workflow will emerge. Something closer to what you just described.
I personally think this deteriorated the in-store shopping experience. There were too many folks running around - it's a different vibe. Never felt that even when stores were packed with regular customers. In addition, some stores blocked out quite a big area within the store for fulling these orders as staging area.
I wonder if they could have that staging area in the back (warehouse or what ever it is called), which wouldn't directly impact the in-store shoppers.
My local WF used to be a nice place to shop before the acquisition. But once Amazon took over, the place turned into an assembly line! It's like you were stepping into a turn-of-the century factory (well, turn of the _last_ century). I just stopped going there.
For me, other than the online order filler folks, I've been surprised by how other little change I've noticed. Aside from promoting kindles in locked glass cases and for some reason ice chests, I hadn't noticed a change.
Yah, Amazon changed the vibe of the place. It's gotten a lot more visually distracting with the visible blue prime stuff everywhere and all the loud reminders for prime rewards and other marketing peppered around the store. Different physical presence too with the Prime Now bagging/staging areas, and the Amazon lockers too.
I'm going to sound like a huge snob, but it makes the in-store shopping experience much less pleasant. The actual whole food workers are always there for you and go out of their way to help you, I don't expect the online shopper order fillers to help me, but they at best DGAF about the in-store shoppers and at worst are hostile towards them.
They speed past people and around corners with carts, cut in line at the fruits and veggies, ask WF employees to help them find items while you've waited to talk to them and in return, flat out ignore actual in-store shoppers when they ask for help. If you're out of the tech loop and don't realize that they are incentivized to fill orders, you might think the online shopper fillers are part of the WF staff there to help you. Knowing this, it's not too jarring to me to see a customer go up to one of them and have their many 'excuse me's just ignored, not even acknowledged.
They need shirts that say don't ask me for help; I know the way they are incentivized to fill as many orders is what creates this behavior - that needs to be looked at as well in my opinion.