Comment by bee_rider

Comment by bee_rider 3 days ago

The idea of a supermarket or department store is kinda “new-ish” (on some historical level), right? Like it is a post 1900 invention I think. Before this, most stores were full service. You go up to a merchant in the bazaar, or the grocer behind his stall, with a list, and they go into the inventory to grab the stuff for you.

The innovation of having customers grab their own stuff without supervision was required for all these massive super stores.

We shouldn’t compare the status quo of self-service with some shoplifting to an imaginary ideal of self-service with no shoplifting. We should compare it against the actual alternative of stores bottlenecked by clerks that can only serve one customer at a time (or at least stores small enough that a clerk can watch everybody doing their self-service). You have to pay those clerks!

Stealing is wrong. But some loss is a cost of doing business. People shouldn’t get irrationally obsessed about it, to the point where they think society is crumbling or whatever. Or make LP so annoying that they scare off normal customers.

khuey 3 days ago

> We should compare it against the actual alternative of stores bottlenecked by clerks that can only serve one customer at a time (or at least stores small enough that a clerk can watch everybody doing their self-service).

The modern version of an old time "full service" store is an e-commerce warehouse in an exurb with quick delivery and that actually works just fine for a lot of things. It's a big component of why the retail sector has been struggling over the past decade.

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bee_rider 3 days ago

Good point.
It might be worth thinking about how these costs are accounted for. In the case of the big store, loss is taken by the store (of course they pass that along as higher prices, but it is ultimately the store’s problem). For deliveries, a good chunk of easy theft (stealing off your porch) is the customer’s problem usually. There’s some unfortunate socioeconomic crosstab there, I think: if you live in a nice neighborhood, theft is less of a problem. If you work from home, you can probably set things up to not leave a package out for too long.
Seems like the burden is falling most squarely on people who live in tough neighborhoods and have to actually go to work.
In some places Amazon has (had?) these self-service lockers where you could pick up your purchases. (Might have been a very college-town centric solution, or something?). It could be nice to see that standardized and spread out.

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- dghlsakjg 3 days ago
  
  Amazon still does lockers and other collection points.
  There is a whole business model built around being a package receiver for folks who don't want deliveries left on their doorstep. Most private PO box companies will receive packages for you, and there are apps that allow any business with a physical location to act as a package receiver for a fee per delivery. Often it is more convenient than residential delivery since you won't get delivery drivers falsely claiming they attempted delivery. When I used to travel a lot, I had a service that would receive mail and packages, and hold them until I was back in town. I think it was ~$10 month and well worth it.
  
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underlipton 3 days ago

Well, if you're actually paying for delivery. What's happening these days seems to be more of an offloading of that expense onto the deliverypeople. It "works" until a working vehicle becomes too expensive. Then, if you're lucky, you're paying the same amount to get your item in a week, when your house hits their algorithmically-generated route. Alternatively, deliveries could actually be priced marginally above cost (instead of below), and a lot of people can't afford it anymore. Good thing those retailers are still open. /s

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bevhill 3 days ago

These exist in retail space now, but you can't go there. DashMarts are full-service general stores that delivery drivers stop at to pick up orders. It's like a ghost kitchen but for Dollar General. If they'd open up a "civilian" window then I'd visit every day.

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vel0city 3 days ago

The Best Buy near me is halfway there. They split their previous retail location in half. One half is still a walk-in retail store experience, but much smaller than before and more focused on being a showroom for the more expensive things and only a handful of accessories actually around on the floor. The other half is pretty much a warehouse. Outside, one set of doors is now dedicated to curbside pickup from the warehouse side. In between the doors to the showroom area and the curbside, it's a big set of automated lockers to pick up orders 24/7.
At a lot of the stores that offer it, the curbside pickup is hopping. Tons of associates constantly wheeling out cartloads of merchandise to an ever-rotating group of cars. More and more people opt for the curbside experience it seems, which is pretty much the full-service experience just more asynchronously. I do it from time to time, but typically not for grocery items as I usually don't like the experience of substitutions or the app saying they have something when they really don't.

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