Someone well-known in the IT field wrote about software reuse in the large vs. in the small about 10-15 years ago. The gist was that reuse in the small is a success, i.e. it's fairly simple to write a function that developers reuse within an application. When you try to generalize use beyond a certain context it becomes significantly more complicated to be successful. I think the motivation for the post was issues in object reuse in OO development. I'm trying to find the original post.
John D. Cook's post shines the light once again on the difficulty of writing reusable components.
No doubt. Even if we increased the pay or found another way to attract people as deliverers, grocery stores need to solve inventory and order picking. They won't keep delivery customers when they can't fulfill 40% of items that a customer requests for delivery. For anything they can fulfill, people picking orders need to understand acceptable substitutions without having to be trained by the customer like an ML system.
My family used grocery delivery for 5 years with a lot of satisfaction. We had two people picking and delivering. One of the two people was a former chef and the other grew up on a family farm. They selected produce and made substitutions on an expert level with little feedback from us. We paid $5 for delivery and they never accepted tips.
I had the same thought about delivery-only stores. Honestly, I'm in support of it. I hate driving. But grocery stores are not up to the task right now with order and delivery systems.
We had grocery delivery for 5 years pre-pandemic. When the pandemic started we tried to continue grocery delivery. However, we found several key issues.
1. A large number of people decided to move to home delivery. We couldn't get a delivery slot for weeks.
2. I was able to get a delivery once. We had to submit the order the night before. Then I had to wake up early the next morning and continually hit refresh on the delivery scheduling page until a slot opened up, probably due to someone canceling. However, 40% of the items we ordered were no longer available. When we go to the grocery store the items are there. For some reason, they show as out when ordering online.
We gave up 6 weeks ago. People who were willing to put up with scheduling weeks in advance and not receiving important parts of their order are finally giving up.
It's not really a preference. Our grocery stores are not setup to handle the volume. Fortunately, we're moving into farmers' market season so we can avoid larger stores to some degree.
John D. Cook's post shines the light once again on the difficulty of writing reusable components.