7 karma · joined March 25, 2011
You know, the kind that makes me look like less of a negligent husband/father/son/friend/uncle/etc...
(startups take their toll in many ways)
A normal non-refrigerated warehouse can pick items (grab from the shelf) well in advance of the "pick up" time for carriers, so orders are ready to go when the truck arrives.
In Ernie's model, it becomes a challenge having items ready when customers arrive, yet minimize the amount of time perishables are out of refrigeration.
This could be addressed a few ways : 1. Asking the customer roughly when they expect to pick up their orders 2. Staging orders in refrigerated and non-refrigerated sections for quick final assembly at pick-up 3. A mechanism like you've described to give some advanced warning to the warehouse.
Very interesting stuff indeed -- I'm envisioning some wicked cool cross and upselling opportunities with punchfork.com's API.
--
Also, I just bought Ed's book ... Really great commentary in there. Somewhat sad I've only been a member of the HN community for such a short time.
The only hard part is getting people to install it. Once it is installed push notifications or constant polling in the background can tell you when others nearby are using it -- I imagine a combination of fine GPS, WiFi SSID comparisons, and cell tower IDs would fine tune it. Of course, not being a mobile developer I don't know whether the last two are even obtainable by a third-party app.