The thing that's wrong with Ocado's technology is that it's ridiculously expensive and tailored for huge FC's (fulfillment centers). The problem with that is that it needs to serve a large population base to be effective and that's hard - in dense metros, the driving times are much longer despite smaller distances. In sparse metros, the distances are just too long. In our experience, the optimal FC size is 5-10K orders/day, maybe up to 20K/day in certain cases, but the core technology should certainly scale down profitably to 3-5K. Ocado solves for scaling up, what needs to be solved is actually scaling down.
There are a lot of logistical challenges outside the FC, especially last mile and you need to see the system as a whole, not just optimize one part to the detriment of all others.
I think the big win with that model vs Ocado is that scaling down is fine, you work with whatever shops are in the area and don't need to deal with building fulfilment centres. Maybe you need a car park somewhere to put the vans overnight. Scaling up is a case of moving into different areas, or onboarding new shops. Absolutely agreed that last mile is a nightmare but we mostly had it down I think, the biggest pain there was that we were relying on a bunch of third parties to pack an order, and if any of them got something wrong we ended up with an unhappy customer on the phone and needing to deal with it.
All juices/waters/beers/wines, paper towels, lots of oranges/grapefruits, cleaning products like bleach/detergent, etc. When they carry them up to your fourth-floor door it's just so much easier.
The smallish shops are good for stuff you can then easily carry in a bag by hand -- meat, veg, cheese, fresh bread.
And I've not yet been able to establish the right criteria to guess how a person is buying their groceries.
Location, age, income, number of people in the household, physical ability...
A single guy living in the city center with good income? Takes his car to go in big supermarket outside the city.
A family with four kids living in the suburbs? Goes everyday in the small shops.
I visit those local shops once or twice almost every day to pick up fresh bits and pieces - but I still get bulky or heavy stuff delivered by Ocado (toilet roll, washing powder, everyday wine, that sort of thing).
Sure, you have Doordash-style same-hour options which are largely based on someone picking stuff up from a local store on your behalf (we have lots of those too). But the Ocado/Kroger robotic hive fulfilment centres ought to be more efficient than that whilst offering higher quality by cutting out the labour-intensive warehouse -> store -> shelf -> checkout part of the process.
I think some of it comes from a feeling of "that can't possibly work", perhaps as a hangover from the failure of Webvan during the dotcom boom. Maybe with some "well, I have to use my car for everything else, so I might as well use it to collect groceries too" layered on top.
Which all points to it being a fairly intractable problem - there are a bunch of only tangentially-related issues that need sorting out before it can be become a widespread success.
Replacing the regional distribution center instead with even higher levels of automation, and getting your groceries delivered from the same warehouse the supermarket is, would give you the scale from the start... but then that increases your frontend delivery costs and more importantly your frontend delivery latency; High latency is a much worse thing with milk than with books or hammers.
To be fair, though, the bulk of Ocado's initial investors were from the retail and finance worlds - and the difference between the US and UK is smaller in those fields than it is for tech.
Instead of having to fight with a machine to give back my empty cans/plastic bottles, I can just give the delivery person a crate and get my money back.
Doesn't capture all my groceries, I love biking or walking to a smaller shop on occasion, or if I have a specific craving, but 90% of my groceries is delivery.
It’s a more limited selection but there’s plenty to choose from and I’m done picking out my groceries in five minutes. They magically show up at my door for very little extra cost and I don’t have to bicker with my kids about grabbing a bunch of random stuff either.
I’m not saying you’re wrong for feeling that way, but you’d be surprised how much work it is to go to a grocery store, no matter how close it is. It’s important to think about other factors here.
I mean I'm not feeling any particular way; I don't have a problem with the neighbours using it. I'm somewhat surprised that it makes sense for them, but each to their own. Myself, I just shop on the way home from work (my walk brings me past one of the supermarkets).
Like a lot of people who work from home there is big difference between the time required to shop, and taking a few minutes away from my desk to get some stuff from the door to the fridge.
I live in the U.S. and have almost never used a service like Instacart. Also, when I see the item I’m trying to order in Amazon is fulfilled by Whole Foods, I typically don’t buy it, because of the additional cost.
I’d rather suffer a small amount of inconvenience to save several dollars on groceries, and often it may mean that I may need to order a different brand to pick up a similar item at a local store.
However, I’ll gladly pay a little additional money for Amazon for many other items, because it’s convenient, shipping is included in Prime, and because I can get what I want.
I make the majority of my retail purchases at a supermarket, followed by Amazon online (Prime only), then a very small percentage in-person at Target, Walmart, or a hardware/home supplies store or some random online retailer.
The best I can do to “shop local” is to use a supermarket chain; there is no mom-and-pop to support that isn’t a chain unless it’s a restaurant. I don’t pretend that this is actually “shopping locally”.
I’ve only participated in a boycott once or twice, because there is typically a practical reason for shopping when and where I do- either I need to shop then because I don’t get out much, or there’s a sale with actually lower prices, rather than the frequent “increase the price just to cut it to get you to order more” thing, which I also get sucked into, because I don’t have time to price shop, unless it’s with camelcamelcamel for Amazon.
They’ll ship me a $10 <thing my project needs> almost always for free and often next day, sometimes same day. And their prices are competitive in general with Amazon and supplyhouse.com.
I don’t know that it’s a great (or even sustainable) offering from their business angle, but I love it as a consumer and DIYer!
They are a bigger fish than the mom and pop stores but that just means that it will take a little longer for the Amazon Prime monopoly cash flow to devour it.
The idea of paying a subscription for the privilege of being scammed sounds ridiculous. The cost of deliveries doesn't magically go down because you're paying a subscription. You're paying for it either way. Either you're overpaying on the subscription because you're not ordering enough or you're overpaying in the form of higher prices that contain the remaining delivery fee.
Sure, if you do a full accounting of costs you may win or lose, but fundamentally people are paying for simplicity. Because almost everyone is lazy, or too busy, or too afraid of random scammers, or whatever, and they played their cards right to become the Sears Catalog from the 19th century in the 21st century.
edit - and one thing that helped them get there is the return policy, so if you get one of those scam sellers, or they sent you wrong crap, opened crap, or just plain everyday crap, you press a couple buttons, maybe drop something off at a UPS store, and problem solved. That definitely shields them from the fallout from their endless listings from sellers like QWERTY123 and ZXCVBN789, and provides an advantage over any other online ordering that doesn't have the same massive advantage of scale.
Predictable delivery, easy/generous customer service, best/tied-for-best price, excellent selection. I'm not sure which part of that is uncompetitive...
(If you know a better price on Airpods 3 Pro or a base M4 Air, do let me know as I'm always happy to save money.)
However, Danish supermarkets are generally kept small by regulation, meaning that there are very few supermarket that could be considered big by international standards.
Still, they are popular.
Most people don't live in city centers. Because they are the most expensive places to live in.
This is village with a population of a bit less than 3000, which I only know about because I have walked East-West across most of the state of Brandenburg (from Słubice in Poland to the city of Brandenburg) and this trains station was a convenient break point:
https://www.google.com/maps/@52.3459295,14.2800967,3a,60y,14...
Here's Aberystwyth, where I did my degree, population 13k, nearby villages boost that by about 6k, students by another 8k:
https://www.google.com/maps/@52.4145833,-4.0848806,3a,75y,19...
I grew up on the south coast of the UK. Which is certainly expensive overall, but it has cheap areas like Leigh Park which used to be entirely council houses (i.e. made for poor people and run by the local council):
https://www.google.com/maps/place/Leigh+Park,+Havant,+UK/@50...
The other two show pedestrianised areas, and all three show pedestrians without any indication of how they go there. When I to to similar areas in my town (pop approx 23k) I have drive there, park, and then walk around.
I have several shops within easy walking distance and many people (including me) do walk to them, but quite a few drive. Few bikes (kids mostly) at shops although leisure cycling is VERY popular here.
One of the nice things about an edge of town area with its own identity as a village is we have a lot of local stuff which is walkable and friendly.
I never had a car in London, and would not want to drive in central London. Public transport is faster, less tiring, and while not cheap, is cheaper than running a car.
Living in Cheshire a car is a necessity.
Yes, and? "Cars are popular" is not a surprising claim that anyone has been contradicting, so far as I can see. (Also, Aberystwyth is tiny enough to get around entirely on foot, and hilly enough that bikers have to be exceptionally fit, and yet despite this, bike racks).
> The other two show pedestrianised areas, and all three show pedestrians without any indication of how they go there.
The Edeka in Briesen is one of the other two, I don't see a pedestrianised area, do you mean the car park owing to the open-air market set up in it?
The other one (Leigh Park) is literally in the middle of a typical UK conurbation with, as is normal in the UK, approximately universal pedestrian access. People can walk there easily from their homes, they can cycle, they can drive, they might even take a bus. One thing they're really not likely to do is come from very far away, because the only people who know about Leigh Park are the adjacent parts of the conurbation and they mostly look up their noses at it because it's poor.
deja-vu from the e-scooter business. even with a good product, its just not profitable/scalable enough
This has been solved by Pio (by AutoStore)
I think scaling up would be the only way out of this problem. Scaling down only makes it worse.
I can't imagine it's especially profitable to deliver a bag of food in a refrigerated van to somewhere that's nearly four hours driving each way.
Unfortunately, auto.ol shared secrets with them, Ocado abused that in court.
Literally, Fuck Ocado. I wouldn't trust them.
Autostore ended up paying Ocado? How did Ocado abuse them?
Note: Ocado was a customer of Autostore in 2012 and just copied them. Sharing IP basically invalidated the lawsuit.
> 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.”
There's probably still room for automation, but it might have to be different than warehouse automation.
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.
Agree a lot of modern delivery businesses involve "self-employed" drivers getting paid a pittance and using their own vehicle and fuel, though.
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.
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.
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.)
And I'm glad to stay outside.
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.
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.
Sounds like the sort of idea a con man would pitch. Oh wait...
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.
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
Basically, each section is like a closed areas with some windows. Customers order at the computers by the windows and flash their membership cards. Robots glide left and right to move 10 samples to the customer, in an arm with rotating clips. Customers can press a button to rotate the samples, observe them, and place an order by pressing a button. Samples not chosen are temporarily stocked at the window as a “stack”.
In each closed section, there are humans who monitors and maintains the robots, and occasionally fetch samples when robots stop working (hopefully it too often, you know those 9s).
At the exit, a human worker assembles the packages and hand them to the customers with a smile. Customers have a last chance to return unwanted items.
Why was it a retro futuristic dream? Because the customers have the option to go into a bakery to enjoy a cup of coffee/tea, some cake and socialize with fellow customers. All of them looked like the men and women from advertisement from Fallout 4.
I’d like to shop or even help build one of these.
[1] https://rarehistoricalphotos.com/keedoozle-automated-store-p...
These are featured in several cultural references, such as the 1962 Delbert Mann film That Touch of Mink, and PDQ Bach's "Concerto for Horn and Hardart" (being named after a prominent New York City automat chain).
Mink: <https://yewtu.be/watch?v=Y3GXMB4VPY8>
Concerto: <https://yewtu.be/watch?v=NT6bxlnS1Is>
Arguably this model has a great deal of compatibility with robotic compact storage, especially in high-land-value areas.
It's not hard to imagine that if a fundamentally similar store today that took the world by storm, there would be a profusion of news stories asserting that the founder is a genius visionary, with nary a peep for Clarence Saunders et al.
Here’s my idea: instant teleportation.
I expect to be credited
Or to give a real-world example: The Wright brothers did some great work on making aircraft steerable and doing wind-tunnel tests, but working planes were mostly a product of ICE engines finally reaching sufficient power-to-weight ratios, not of the Wright brothers being unique geniuses. In a long line of people trying to build heavier-than-air aircraft they were simply the first to have access to the necessary technology to make it work
Basically a catalogue store without shipping to your door.
IKEA is kind of like that also, but you have to get everything yourself after picking it out upstairs. And Sears might have been like this at some point before I was born.
If you pre-order it's waiting at the desk. Very handy for people who can order from the job site on the account and send the lad round to grab it.
And a (relatively) unshittified website too because if jobbing tradies can't use the damn thing because it's too loaded down with ads and bullshit, they just won't.
>In the 1990s, Consumers Distributing struggled to compete with Zellers and then Walmart Canada. Consumers Distributing sought bankruptcy protection in 1996.
And Zellers went under just a few years ago...
I do research price, though, so if they show a big DISCOUNT sign and is more or less honest with it, I'll probably grab some, too.
TBH, now that I think about it, the dream was way more vague than what I described in the reply. My brain probably reasoned about the idea subconsciously.
The only exception in warehouse was the cafeteria. I guess my brain wanted to make something retro futuristic so it made the cafeteria “retro” — manned by humans and cooked by humans too. There were even balloons inside now that I recall…
Then in the 90s they were all washed away by the new ones.
> Fenyo added that Kroger’s decision to locate the Ocado centers outside of cities turned out to be a key flaw.
They over-spent on automating low-volume FCs. You could draw comparisons to Amdahl's law, they optimised the bit that wasn't the issue, the real issue was delivery distances and times.
Ocado has had good success with the robotics approach in the UK, because the UK is very high density compared to a lot of the US. Plus Ocado put a lot of work into creating good delivery routes, whereas it sounds like that wasn't a component of the automation stack that Kroger bought.
Robotics for picking and the general feasibility of grocery delivery in the US.
Ocado is good because their stock levels are far more accurate than the other supermarkets for online ordering, so you don't get as many substituted/missing items. This is sort of a side effect of having dedicated picking facilities Vs "real" supermarkets. I would not be surprised if they "lose" less stock as well compared to in supermarket fulfillment.
Then you have "is online grocery good in the US"? There's a lot of areas of the US that have reasonable density for this kind of service imo, and the road infrastructure is generally far superior to the UK which negates any loss of density (as you care about time between deliveries, not distance per se). I imagine the much better parking options in most suburbs in the US also helps efficiency (it's an absolute nightmare for a lot of the online delivery cos when there isn't off street parking in the UK and they have to park pretty far from the drop).
It sounds to me that Kroger just messed up the execution of this in terms of "marketing" more than anything.
> You didn’t have enough people ordering, and you had a fair amount of distance to drive to get the orders to them
It's clearly not a technology problem, but it was made worse by heavily investing in robotics for locations that already couldn't sustain a fulfillment center.
Just the model. They optimized for tax outcomes. They obviously wanted in on the "Amazon race to the bottom" game.
https://www.leesburg-news.com/2025/11/30/kroger-took-incenti...
> the real issue was delivery distances and times.
Which they could care less about. Where else are you going to go?
Sounds like there were some politics involved in the original decision.
We have done grocery pickup for years but the pickup lanes are almost always empty while dozens of shoppers walk into the store.
To me, shopping for groceries by hand is a waste of time but it clearly has some utility for a lot of people.
I wonder if that inertia is making traditional grocery shopping stickier than it should be and disincentivizing optimization.
I hope consumer tastes will change because there’s no reason for us to all walk into a giant warehouse every week.
A guitarist doesn't just buy some random guitar from amazon - they see it in person and play it. If you cook and care about your food, using a food service just isn't something you'll want to do.
Purchasing online feels more narrow and has me thinking more about things I've cooked before vs what I might want to try cooking/eating.
Shopping for food is important to me because food is important to me, and I have no desire to change this despite how "inefficient" it may be. This attitude has already very nearly optimized out most of the texture of daily life to no benefit that is apparent to me.
The title is a red herring.
Kroger should have pulled a Wal-Mart and turned to their shrink-heavy stores in urban centers to online fulfillment only -- basically only their delivery drivers can retrieve items for an order, and everything's shopped by an associate (Look south of the MicroCenter in Dallas if you want to see what one looks like: it still has the Murphy USA in the parking lot and is basically an unbranded walmart building with 'driver' and 'associate' entrances -- and then deployed the robotics there: less retail space, more online/fulfillment capacity (have humans grab produce and custom sliced/packed items, robots pick the dry goods), and while you lose some cashier jobs, you'll probably have net improvement in terms of time waiting to be picked.
You could also count shoe stores and high-end jewelry and watch stores in that the clerk has to go in the back to fetch the non-display model.
Graybar[1], for instance: There's a counter with bar stools, and behind that counter are people who know their inventory very well.
I just walk in and tell them what I want. They write it all down on paper faster than I can say the words and then disappear into the back to fetch it while I help myself to a free ice cream sandwich from the freezer over on the right that one of the local trade unions provides.
[1]: Graybar is a US-based electrical supply place. The companies I work for have accounts there, but as far as I know anyone can walk in and buy stuff. They also have some datacom stuff. If I'm in the middle of Nowhere, Ohio and need, say, a single-mode patch cord today, then there's probably a Graybar less than an hour away that has one in stock. Otherwise, they'll have one for me tomorrow before 7:00AM.
...with the caveat that McMaster's facilities are staffed by people, not robots.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Service_Merchandise
I have never been to one because they went out of business decades ago.
honestly, i wouldn't shop at this store, i want to get the items myself, without any interaction. interactions add delays.
It is possible, but you end up spending 10x as much on the building.
Lots of big cities have grocery stores with parking garages under them, doesn’t seem much different.
The answer is $. It costs too much and land is cheaper than building up (In most places).
The ones in Bellaire and Meyerland are two level with parking (aka flooding space) below the store and a smaller parking lot on the second level with the store. Bellaire also has a fancy fuel cell setup for some reason. The single level HEB in Montrose(ish) was built into the site of an old complex of charming but nearly abandoned standalone quad/duplexes with many mature oaks. They seem to have retained nearly all of the trees on the grounds in greenspaces within the parking lot and entryway.
Here's some street view of Montrose. They also had a bike air and repair system when it opened. I'm not certain if it stayed in good repair itself. https://maps.app.goo.gl/KxHAvDqKca4E8L8a7
Also, the backstock is minimal. Stores are designed for turnaround.
Retail stores are logistics. And part of that is product flow. There are trucks coming in every single day. When you buy an item at a store, that item is deducted from the store's inventory, when that item's stock reaches a certain threshold, an order is immediately placed to the distribution center, and that item is loaded onto a truck and could arrive as soon as that night.
There's no reason to keep anything "in the back" except for high demand items that aren't brought in by a vendor and overflow from items that didn't quite fill a shelf.
Bread/snack cakes (Little Debbie, the bakery also does bread), chips, soda, and liquor/beer are typically handled by vendors. Coca-Cola has a guy come out and stock the Coca-Cola products. Frito-Lay has a guy handle the Frito-Lay products. Etc. They don't work for the store in any capacity.
Vendors typically come during the normal operating hours of the store. Bread guys like to be early in the morning. Chip and soda guys have routes and they'll get to you depending on how the rest of their route goes.
As for other stock, for the grocery side, the distribution center usually palletize stock based on aisle. And the pallets come shrinkwrapped on a truck that arrives at the store between 8 and 10. Someone from the store unloads the pallets from the truck into the warehouse. Once the truck is unloaded, they head back to the distribution center. At the store, the pallets are then staged near their respective aisles and workers restock the shelves overnight.
On the general goods side, the stock is loose in the truck, and a team of people unload the truck and palletize it based on department. Then those pallets are staged in the department for stocking by the overnight crew.
Source: my first job was with WalMart. I worked day stock in a few departments on both the grocery and general goods sides. I worked unloading the trucks on the general goods side. I also worked overnight on the general goods side. I've been involved with a good portion of the store side of the restocking. So all of this information is at least 20 years old, some things may have changed. But I've seen the vendors still while I'm shopping, so the broad strokes likelys till apply.
Unlike Publix if I see a discount I know it is a discount. Every other item in Kroger has a yellow tag and a red price to make you think you are getting a deal when in fact the red number is higher than regular price at normal stores.
Tesco used to use plastic box liners which you doing just hoick out, but those were quickly stopped due to bring plastic.
I'd rather they just handed over the crates or something and I could return them for a deposit the next time. Obviously I'd also rather all the supermarkets could share the same crates so I don't have to babysit piles of each brand separately.
Maybe Ocado have a better system then Tesco here?
You are charged for the bags (in the UK you have to charge 5p for plastic bags) but are refunded when you return them (during a later delivery).
Ocado does just fine though, and are rarely the cheapest choice.
Not quite. Packed yes, but for many vegetables they have both item count and weight-based packages, e.g. "4 potatoes" vs "1kg potatoes".
I think that strikes the right balance.
This I guess is Robo Kroger.
A weird, dark, maze-like warehouse-feeling Kroger that just closed.
We have a really nice Kroger a bit outside town. I always think of it as the Gucci Kroger.
A college-kid, cheaper Kroger close to the center of town. The cheaper version of the Harris Teeter nearby.
There's as much variation in individual Krogers as between other grocery chains!
... As in the supermarket had a disco ball? Was it spinning?
I don't know what success looks like but it's probably fair to say they were over-extended by roughly 30-40%.
https://chainstoreage.com/kroger-pay-350-million-automation-...
Guess I was right.
Honestly the main problem seems to be most people just don't like buying certain items online, and that doesn't seem to be changing quickly. If Covid didn't break people out of that, I can't think of anything that will.
And FWIW, I think for an online only supermarket you'd expect their website to be pretty amazing, but their competitors are just as good.
Any reason to like the old way is just nostalgia in my head.
Indeed, but not at McDonalds.
Despite the math working out insanely well for self service checkout, sometimes the gamble still doesn't pay off and the single employee burns through 4 carts faster than 6 self service checkout kiosks.
Costco does pretty good here though, drug stores go slow as hell.
There may also be an issue with logistics when it comes to making sure the machines keep running if there is a problem. They can barely keep the ice cream machines running.
Maybe they're just following the trends their own numbers tell them are happening, but I don't think they trust robotics enough to put an area they truly care about under its purview just yet.
But I’ve read they’re effective, apparently, in consistently upselling compared to a human, so I’m guessing that’s their play.
I associate it more with delivery vans that seem to be in no particular hurry (unlike uber eats / DPD / UPS etc)
According to the article, there were several strategic blunders, including trying the model outside of cities where lack of density cut against it. Plus the apparent dismissal any value their 2700 retail locations could provide.
As far as I can tell, Kroger didn’t acknowledge anything except a change in strategy.
Unsure how the headlines doesn't align. Maybe it's different than what I'm seeing:
> Kroger acknowledges that its bet on robotics went too far
That makes sense to me.
Feels like we’re going to have warehouse scale vending machines in cities, and delivery bots taking them from the warehouse-vending-machine to the customer.
Because tips are important to the income of delivery shoppers, I find that I generally get good produce selections. It might be difficult to transition that particular incentive to robots, but the point is that delivery items don't have to suck.
The only thing I really still pick out by hand every time are beef briskets. Pork shoulders tend to be uniform enough that randomly picking a cryovac works out, but there's a good bit of variation in brisket that makes a difference with the final product, at least when the brisket is prepared with a smoker. YMMV
Wait, you tip to get a good selection of produce to be delivered to you? This is very bizarre to me.
With Instacart & Costco memberships and also ordering from the local discount grocers, I can get food delivered for less than it costs to actually go to the mainstream grocery stores like Von's, and I don't get bruised eggplants or cilantro that's already going bad. The drivers/shoppers are generally quite good at picking out items that can lead to higher tips (that or they're just in it for the love of good produce, but either way you can often tell they're not randomly loading the bags).
In any event, delivery doesn't always mean the worst of the produce aisle, and while I noted that the incentive of tips might not transfer to robots, keeping repeat customers might be enough incentive for a way to be found to not make robots and grocery synonymous with only frozen food. That might mean human pickers; better automation on the food selection system; pre-inspected, washed and packaged fruits & veggies; etc.
I'm also skeptical it'll ever work in America due to the general lack of density.
Here is the story
https://www.facebook.com/100064532630592/posts/pfbid0DYoPXet...
Looking at the details, I could say Kroger shouldn't have hired her but I'd rather say that if she was dangerous enough to not hire as a driver then her license shouldn't have been reinstated in the first place. (Though that's if "couldn’t recall if her driver’s license was suspended just months before he hired her" means it actually was suspended, and Bike Law isn't doing some trickery with wording.)
Either way good they paid out.
For the shutdown, I do think it's a coincidence. They're shutting down facilities in multiple states and that lawsuit isn't even a tenth of a percent of the relevant costs.
(As an aside, they also have some of the best meat and produce you can get in the city without going to a farmers market. So many retail grocery stores here lack loading docks, the food handling getting from the truck to the sidewalk to the basement of the store to the shelves is really, really rough especially during the summer months. Skipping that and going warehouse-to-home has advantages)