Hacker News Reader

Comment by ninalanyon | Hacker News Reader

> workers are not equipped to fix an HVAC system.

But they are perfectly capable of checking the temperature. After all the fridges and freezers are restocked multiple times a day so even if one failed it wouldn't have time to get warm before someone should notice.

Ad there are other ways of monitoring such as having an audible or visual alarm.

View on HN

Do you think grocery stores are 24/7? How often do you think these checks happen? Do you think it's the best way for those employees to spend their time? How often would these checks need to be performed to show statistical significance? Do you have reason to believe these things have never been thought about by people who run grocery stores? What are the labor requirements in a grocery store to run effectively?

These checks do not need to happen 24 times a day. It is in fact perfectly acceptable for the workers to check it in the morning. I swear to god HN is inventing issues that dont exist to defend overengineered solutions.

Also, offline fridges are completely normal.

They don't have to be 24/7 for multiple daily checks upon refilling to happen.

Workers, or humans in general, are not very reliable. Especially for a maintenance / checking task that's almost always feels pointless because the freezer will have the right temperature: people strapped for time will skip that step.

Moving the check online doesn't remove the unreliable human, it just switches it from a stock person to an it person, or whoever receives the email in their inbox.

You can automate things.

> restocked multiple times a day

[citation needed]

Where I live, stores don't open on Sundays. Many apparently do in France, but I imagine not all of them. So there are potentially 24 + 12 hours where nobody's there to check stuff

And in those times no one opens the freezer or fridge so they stay cold. And what is the failure rate of fridges and freezers anyway? I had my previous fridge for thirty years before it failed and the freezer for twenty five. I'm pretty sure that those installed in commercial premises are built to last.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com