Comment by liveoneggs
Comment by liveoneggs 5 days ago
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.
Comment by liveoneggs 5 days ago
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.
I can see how minimizing drive times is cheaper in aggregate but there is just so much commercial space here in Atlanta..
I suppose you pay for the retail stores either way so the threshold to justify a "dark store" is pretty high unless it can double up as the regional grocery warehouse or something.
No, Walmart. Their drivers were actually quite nice as well, at least the ones I met. The standards were high, I have mixed feelings about Walmart overall with respect to their line level employees, but in general everyone meant well. This was quite a long time ago though, and we were still in "startup" mode and focused on gaining market share, as opposed to focusing on squeezing out as much profit as possible.
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.