COVID-19: Chapter 7 - Brags, Beats, and Variants

Hint 1 may not apply to households without multiple small children

I expect them to know you need motor oil to keep your car running though.

Iā€™m also really confused. Why would any grocery store ever agree to this?

My biggest issue is I buy a lot of bagged salad greens. You really have to inspect that stuff before you buy it or you will get lots of limp/rotting greens. I guess I can start buying heads/bunches of the stuff I like, but I eat a lot of salad and preparing/cleaning the greens is just a huge PITA. Iā€™ve tried it and hated it, but if thatā€™s what I have to do itā€™s better than dying or getting the long-term COVIDity.

I guess that Instagram is big enough that stores donā€™t want them to exclusively take their business to a competitor.

And yea volume and I would imagine the store also sets up some type of charge account so they can also save on the credit card processing fees.

Iā€™d even make the ID optional.

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Volume.

eta: Oh man. They cut off the ending. ā€œPeople ask how we make money. (pause) Volume.ā€

Do you put the paper towel in the tub of spinach because I started doing that and itā€™s money

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My wifeā€™s been ordering a lot of those premade salads that come in clear plastic bowls. Not as good as homemade, but I donā€™t think weā€™ve had problems with freshness.

100% agreed. From a safety perspective, having an instacart shopper buy stuff for you is no safer than doing it yourself, and probably worse since they have to spend time in the store thinking up implausible substitutes to put in your order. Amazon Fresh is good for delivery if itā€™s available in your area.

I generally eat two huge salads a day, so if itā€™s fresh when I get it home itā€™s almost never here long enough to spoil. The key for me is not buying greens that are already spoiled/spoiling.

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Not going to lie I was dumbfounded when I saw it.

It makes no sense to me, and is not long term sustainable.

Grocery delivery has been tried for a long time. Internet versions started shortly after the internet became public. A lot of early attempts were done by stores themselves. Pretty sure they all failed.

Instacart is essentially grocery Uber. They donā€™t have a sustainable plan. Only for them they get to exploit their workers and their suppliers. They are pushing towards an IPO, which will just give them more cash to burn, although they had their first profitable quarter this year.

If you are essentially a scheduling app and you get ~$9 PLUS 10% of every order and you just now started making money, what have you been doing.

I donā€™t see anyway it is sustainable. After the pandemic I think we will see a lot of stores reassess their relationship.

Some chains have raised their prices on their delivery items to offset the ten percent fee.

Others are using parts of instacart and I suspect paying less. Walmart started using instacart but in a slightly different manner. I suspect they pay less than 10%. I know Kroger uses their own shoppers and then instacart just delivers.

Oh yeah and instacart has started making ad deals with suppliers to push products, money that normally would go to the grocery chains.

Thatā€™s the struggle I have. Not like Iā€™m doing a bunch of high risk stuff besides sending kids to
school (zero in school spread in the fall, obviously need to rethink now). But Iā€™m not riskless. I do go to the store every couple of weeks, occasional take out, coffee take out once a week, took the kids to outdoor attractions and uncrowded playgrounds in the summer/early fall before cases spiked. If I could vote for a hard shut down for six weeks where no one goes out and the military patrols and distributes food id vote yes. But since society is determined to OFB and roll out
for vaccines is a shitshow so this is going to linger for 12-24 months, I just struggle giving up the occasional low risk slice of normalcy while 40 percent of the country is out YOLOng. Mentally weak, stipulated, but for fuck sake man there no we here in USA #195, my incremental help just feels like pissing in the wind.

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WebVan.

I think this is what Costco does with Instacart, delivery items are definitely more expensive than in-store.

Restaurants and delivery services have the same relationship, as you probably know. The whole gig/delivery ecosystem is super exploitative. The models eventually all only work if you can cut out the middle man, I.e. the labor, and replace it with robots/self-driving cars.

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You may also want to look into restaurant supply places. In New York, a number of these have been marketing to individual consumers because their restaurant volume is down so much (e.g., https://www.baldorfood.com/). I donā€™t use them myself, but I think they have higher quality and more specialty offerings than the typical grocery services. I would be surprised if there arenā€™t similar options in LA.

Now youā€™re talking.

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Also, grocery coops might be doing better at this.

Just an example

Joking aside, with these tales of holidays Iā€™m beginning to feel like a total mug** for cancelling both foreign holidays this year.

** an idiot or fool (Eng.); un grand con (Fr.).