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Comment by nprz | Hacker News Reader

Grocery stores should really just turn themselves into warehouses and only allow workers in the store. Grocery stores could provide safer working conditions by checking temps of employees before entering the store and providing masks and gloves for all workers. This would help mitigate the risk of covid exposure for both employees and customers.

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This goes against labor trends in the supermarket industry since the early 1900s, and would increase labor needs considerably. The original grocery stores were full-service like this, but assortment was still small and tastes were provincial. Supermarkets have been shedding labor consistently since the full-service days, and are managed towards ever increasing the UPLH metric (Units Per Labor Hour). Instacart serves as a sort of stop gap measure during the uncertainties of this pandemic. The nature of Instacart "hiring" is non-binding: employees are not bound to do any amount of work, and Instacart is under no obligation to provide it. These 250,000 workers are not guaranteed any amount of wages or hours, which is much different than if the supermarket industry tried to do what you propose. That approach is much more appealing to the supermarket industry: as work surges, people who need the work do it, and as the work subsides, they fade into the wood work. Personally I advocate for strong worker rights and a healthy labor market, but it will take more than a pandemic to get the supermarket industry to increase their direct workforce significantly.

Here in Ontario, Canada we have an online food delivery service (https://grocerygateway.com) and they built a super-automated distribution factory to help run this (and all of their stores in the area).

A distribution center in the UK has already mastered this:

> The Ocado Andover CFC is a three-storey grid of storage crates containing groceries. On top of the grid a fleet of 1,100 robots grab items and deliver them to “pick stations” where “personal shoppers” assemble orders for delivery. According to Ocado, an order of 50 items takes five minutes to pick and pack.

http://www.canadiangrocer.com/top-stories/a-sneak-peak-at-th...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4DKrcpa8Z_E

Google "automated grocery distribution", there's plenty of examples.

This is essentially unskilled labour moving boxes from one point to another. The exception is vegetables/fruit where a human discards the bad stuff before it goes into another box for delivery on a truck. 95% of that process could be automated. Including eventually the delivery drivers in between the distribution center <-> retail endpoint pickup centers (where consumers and last-mile Instacart/delivery drivers can go in person for pickup - I'm assuming humans will be needed for home delivery for a long time).

Instacarts biggest drawback is the cost and how they nickel-and-dime you, but GroceryGateway is run by the grocery store itself, and it's much better and actually helps you save money by shows you all the deals in the interface (imagine sorting a grocery store by discounts and price, as you walk through it gets more expensive). There is very little markup vs the stores, I've found it to be cheaper in practice, especially factoring in my time.

A fully integrated/automated version of this with far less urban real estate + labour costs will bring the prices down significantly.

I have a feeling only smaller luxury/farmers market/vegetable+fruit+meat only (+ semi-automated pantry section) shops will exist in the future. You don't really need to pick up most stuff by hand, but an in-person browsing UX can still be useful. Ikea stores are halfway to figuring this out.

I've used both and they are different services.

Grocerygateway you select like white bread and hope that yoir brand and brown bread doesn't come. You select apples and they are out and will give you pears.

InstantCart felt modern. You select the exact brand size. When the morning comes you will see the items the person found in real time on the app. The useful part was when an item is not found the delivery person will select a replacement that you see in real time and you can reject or replace with other items. For those that want a more interactive shopping experience I recommend, feels like I'm on the phone with someone as they shop.

Yeah I agree, the future is somewhere in between the two. I basically want Instacart UI/UX attached to an automated grocery distribution center.

With Ocado I select a time slot and they know what will be available with very few substitutions. Definitely not apples-for-pears level.

It's up to them to tune. They could make it exact(don't overpromise any stock) but then be stuck with unsold stock due to customers amending their orders. Or they can oversell slightly and offer refunds or returns for unwanted substitutions, which is what they do.

> The Ocado

Who are running a service to almost 0% of their normal customers right now

What makes you say that? New registrations have been closed for a long time

In the early 1900s they didn't have a lot of the technology we have today. There are things that can be automated away as well as many other logistical optimizations that can be made if you're designing the store as a warehouse instead of both a warehouse and a customer experience. That experience moves online. Of course this is more of a long term thing and would require a big investment.

Something like Trader Joes would be great for this. Very limited number of SKUs (e.g. 1-2 kinds of wheat bread, rather than 10). If you combine with automation, could get the costs down considerably. But I'd bet most of the labor hours are going to be burned on the delivery itself, not the assembling of the order.

Not everyone can afford delivery fees, especially with these layoffs. And those fees are not small at all hey.

Then society should supplement their budget through social safety nets. I don't think its acceptable to risk the health of the grocery store employees because some people can't afford delivery (they don't even need delivery, just store pick up)

Not everyone is interested in what a random "shopper" decide that someone is going to get. It was tried in USSR where the shopper was whoever was a manager of a supermarket. Those got solidly trounced when the first "swiss markets" showed up.

You can afford them if you buy 2+ months of groceries at a time.

True, but so long as people are eating fresh bread, meat, fruit and milk they'll be going to the store for those - and won't they pick up the other things they need at the same time?

The entire point is that people aren't going out.

I think this could be implemented with a pickup option

Those fees are for everyone's safety. If other people have deliveries, I'm less likely to get sick and die.

Delivery fees should be part of the stimulus.

If everyone who can afford them paid delivery fees for everyone who can't, we'd all come out way ahead, both health-wise and economically. This is one of the biggest economic no-brainers since some states started making everyone wear a $2 cloth face mask to reduce R0.

"If other people have deliveries, I'm less likely to get sick and die."

Outside of the very worst-hit parts of the world, going shopping while taking precautions does not seem to be capable of raising the transmission rate to unacceptable levels. We're not trying to prevent every and all infection, only to keep the rate of new infections at a sustainable level.

Why do you say that?

The US seems to have an R0 of right around 1 with lockdowns. Shopping is the major place people continue to intermingle.

If we brought R0<<1, the virus would die off. If R0 > 1, we all get sick eventually.

And aside from that, school and work closures are much more expensive than food delivery. The ROI of not having everyone congregate in stores seems huge in comparison.

I say that because I don't think anyone expects the virus to die off, save for a mutation or herd immunity (via vaccine or otherwise). Lockdowns are not and never were intended to kill the virus. Only to control the spread.

That is basically what Whole Foods in SF is doing. They are only open to the public from like 9a-1p and from 1p-7p its delivery workers only.

Online grocery shopping takes me twice as long, and I lose out on the discoverability of a physical store.

We used to do it but we stopped because they don’t know how to pick fruits and vegetables, and they never know what a turnip is.

> Grocery stores could provide safer working conditions by checking temps of employees before entering the store and providing masks and gloves for all workers

Checking temperatures is pretty much useless, when you can be totally asymptomatic, while spreading the virus for days.

That's the big difference (and difficulty) as compared to the first version of SARS, where symptoms appeared virtually instantly after infection.

> Checking temperatures is pretty much useless, when you can be totally asymptomatic, while spreading the virus for days.

It may not be 100% effective but it would surely help, possibly significantly. If we eliminated all but asymptomatic spread, how would that affect the reproduction rate?

It helps on the margins, just like masks and hand-washing. The more low-impact methods we can implement to reduce the transmission rate, the fewer high-impact methods are necessary.

They do this in some places. But still allow in customers. Checking tempature seems like a good way to avoid spreading other illnesses. Win-win.

What about the idea that we should build up herd immunity in the summer so we’re not dealing with corona and flu in the fall? I guess we’d want healthy people to be out together if so.

I heard that somewhere. Not sure if it makes sense.

> What about the idea that we should build up herd immunity in the summer so we’re not dealing with corona and flu in the fall?

Nobody currently knows whether or not getting COVID-19 makes you immune to getting it again.

Do you have a source? I can’t think of any other virus that works like that (except hiv which attacks the immune system)

https://twitter.com/statesdj/status/1252698777296797698?s=21

> If you’re hoping a vaccine is going to be a knight in shining armor saving the day, you may be in for a disappointment. SARSCOV2 is a highly contagious virus. A vaccine will need to induce durable high level immunity, but coronaviruses often don’t induce that kind of immunity 1/ > There’s a nice preprint just out on antibody responses to SARSCOV2. Lots of people don’t develop much of an IgM response and the IgG response fades noticeably after just two months https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2020.04.15.20066407v... 2/ This is consistent with the other human coronaviruses. They induce an immune response, but it tends to fade so the same virus can reinfect us a year or two later. https://t.co/MFQyjhZF0T?amp=1 3/ The experience with veterinary vaccines for coronaviruses is also not great. There are economically important coronaviruses infecting farm animals and we’ve been trying to develop good vaccines for decades. Most on these vaccines are putzy https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7138383/ 4/

The thread’s longer but the prognosis is not good.

I've been receiving the influenza vaccination every year. It wouldn't be a huge problem to receive also SARS-CoV-2 vaccination on top of that. Also at some point my kid received Rota-virus vaccinations every 3-6 months. It would be a hassle to inject everyone but doable in a country with modern medical system.

I don't know what you're trying to accomplish with this kind of speculation in the context of the thread (namely: infected people might not develop immunity, therefore herd immunity might not be possible).

Is it possible that we won't develop an effective vaccine? Yes, of course. We've never successfully made a coronavirus vaccine.

But 1) that doesn't tell you much about the natural state of immunity for a virus (i.e. there are/were lots of viruses that infer immunity for which we had difficulty creating a vaccine), and 2) let's say you're right, and it isn't possible to gain immunity at all...what are we supposed to do then? Lock ourselves inside forever?

Obviously, we're eventually going to end this, one way or another. Either we achieve herd immunity, or we just learn to live with another endemic virus that is occasionally fatal to a small percentage of the infected.

I feel like there are a lot of "contrarian" types here who just want to make a fetish of the societal doom aspect of this thing.

The coronaviruses that cause about 20% of common colds work that way.

do you have a source on that?

https://medicalxpress.com/news/2012-03-dont-immune-colds.htm...

https://www.newscientist.com/article/mg24532754-600-can-you-...

Thanks for providing those. Interesting reading however:

The first article is talking about rhinovirus not corona.

The second article just says we don’t know, but it does mention monkeys developing a strong immunity.

From a previous thread, I estimated that if NY had 20% antibody presence for 15k dead, that implies there will be 60k dead by the end of the process. Roughly one 9/11 every week or so?

Sorry that I don't have the sources here, but I remember reading a few times that many people will have a low amount of antibodies.

Then, on this video, the doctor mentions that we don't know yet how much antibodies you need to be completely/somewhat immune, which makes sense. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EtP-QPv39kg

Also, even if you are immune, we also don't know yet how long that immunity lasts.

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