From now on any time someone tries to tell me that cars haven't fundamentally broken the brains of a good percentage of the population, I'm going to show them this video. It's like a mashup of Wall-E and the time my dad committed suicide in the garage after my mom divorced him.
When I think of fresh produce, I definitely want to smell the exhaust of some ragged out hooptie. How is this better than the ClickList or curbside options that Kroger and other stores have now? Trying to set up that infrastructure can't be cheaper than just hiring an extra person to do the ClickList shopping within the existing store.
I love shopping now. I get to hate the other shoppers as well as most of the staff, who are now also shoppers.
A drive-thru beer store is just a classic establishment. Ours was big enough I could pull my boat thru it back in the day. Which was nice because after a day of skiing and wakeboarding my legs were usually like Jell-O.
Coal isn’t even necessary, the normal car fumes will kill every employee there. I mean seriously… Do they plan on every car being electric that enters that place? Last time I checked, the principles of detection indicated to me that car exhaust was BAD for human lungs. That video looks like a child’s idea on what a grocery store should be.
Not only that, but: In order for all "stations" to have a full selection, the entire inventory of the store has to be kept at each station. That means a minimum on-hand inventory of X quantity for every item the store carries, where X is the number of simultaneous shoppers. X checkout staff is required as well, and each of them is idle for the entire duration of a a customer's browsing. How the fuck do you handle frozen and/or hot foods? The energy requirements of vertically conveying the entire selection of the store every time a customer browses. You can offset the energy requirements by balancing the weights of the items... but what happens when customer selection unbalances your vertical conveyor? Your entire parking lot now has to be indoors, or at the very least your customers have to be comfortable doing their shopping quasi-outdoors. "Lift with your legs, not your insanely overtorqued torso reaching through a car window. Some of the above can be ameliorated slightly, but all in pursuit of a solution that is just orders of magnitude less time and space efficient than just... eliminating the shopping entirely and delivering the items directly to the customer's door.
They had a system that worked great in the 80's. Buy your food, and when you checked out, they put them in plastic bins and sent them underground on a conveyor to the drive thru pickup point. You got plastic cards with numbers that matched the bin, and you handed them to a high school kid in the drive thru and they loaded them into your car for you. These days you can buy all your shit online and then just pull up and they'll load them into your car. I have zero clue what problem this is trying to solve.
my wife buys shit on an app, someone goes to the store for us, then delivers it to our door at a time we choose. If they don’t have the item, they text her which items are available as substitutions. And it’s always the same people who know us, so if they store has something in stock they’re usually short on (like our kids’ favorite lunchables which the supply chain has fucked up for some reason) they’ll grab extra because they know we’ll want it. It’s like $100 a year for the service, a few cents more per item, and you tip them. Worth it for the time savings alone. Shipt is the name, but there’s other services like it. We’ve been doing it since right before the start of the pandemic and I’ve been into a grocery store *maybe* half a dozen times since then.
You lived in the west end with the really cool A&P checkout. I used to ask my parents to drive across town to shop there, just because your stuff disappeared like airport luggage and you picked up your groceries in the middle of the parking lot. I thought that was the coolest thing. The bin-and-roller system WAS great. Stores got rid of the entire “bag boy” service seemingly to be cheaper.
I'm still waiting for the first grocery store that is pickup only. I feel like its time has definitely come, yet I've never seen anything more than just the "we support instacart kinda" style.
Yep... Instacart. It costs a bit of a premium, but I haven't stepped into a Loblaws or Costco in 2 years thanks to it. The only thing I do other than that for groceries is go to a fancy grocery (Remark, @Crown Royal will roll his eye and say "you shop at fucking Remark? Of course you do..."), for fresh produce and higher-end, hard to find culinary shit. If you want to spend $100 on REALLY nice balsamic vinegar? Remark is your place. You know it. Went to Saunders, right across the street from A&P. It's now some smelly Chinese "SuperKing" market or something... went in there once to see what they had and all you could smell was bad fish as soon as you walked in. Never went back.
Once again my policy prescription of "summary roadside execution for any driver of a truck with a modified exhaust" is shown to be merely a moderate stance.
How did I COMPLETELY forget about this, and when did they phase it out so seamlessly?! I hope Crown doesn't hate on Remark. That's seriously the best grocery store in southern Ontario.
Where I live it is on the ocean so it regulates the temperature pretty consistent. Normal winter consistent lows is -10C with dips down to -15c. We have had a few years where it has been -15C to -20C for a week or so and being right on the ocean with the 90percent humidity that is fucking cold. When i attempted university for a couple of years it wasn't unusual for weeks at a time to be -30C.
Remark is good. But I have Sunripe that’s very close to me and those are my favourite. The stores have a similar vibe.