> Fenyo added that Kroger’s decision to locate the Ocado centers outside of cities turned out to be a key flaw.
> “Ultimately those were hard places to make this model work,” said Fenyo. “You didn’t have enough people ordering, and you had a fair amount of distance to drive to get the orders to them. And so ultimately, these large centers were just not processing enough orders to pay for all that technology investment you had to make.”
There's probably still room for automation, but it might have to be different than warehouse automation.
If a basket of groceries brought online costs $15 more than the in-store prices, then you can pick in-store profitably, very easy. That's the instacart model.
But if a basket of groceries brought online costs about the same as buying in-store? With the retailer bearing the costs of picking, packing and delivery instead of the customer?
Well then you need something more efficient than a store.
I've also noticed this with hardware stores like Lowes. If I place a pickup order they more often than not will pawn off on me their broken, returned, or even used and damaged stock. Items like building wrap will have soil and rips on it, concrete mix will be spoiled from moisture, lumber will be all the most warped pieces (if you don't order a whole pallet, expect every last piece of fractional pallet will be knotted to hell, split, twisted, and badly warped), plumbing valves will be open package and leaky, etc etc. It's like clockwork, even if the stock sitting on the shelf doesn't have these problems. Due to this there are some stores I will never do a pickup/delivery order from.
There is no delivery service that's cheaper and good enough, or dirt cheap and expected to be awful, but those are large profitable retail operations. The only sector offered is more expensive, which annoys people if they occasionally get a below average item while also paying a lot more.
Delivery is for people who buy tenderloin not ground chuck and they get MAD when their tenderloin isn't perfect.
Agree a lot of modern delivery businesses involve "self-employed" drivers getting paid a pittance and using their own vehicle and fuel, though.
On two separate occasions, I stopped by Walmart recently and spent $0.50 extra and $1.50 extra by walking in, going to the aisle, and picking up the item myself.
The Walmart app even tells you that the price on the app is only for online orders. But I didn’t want to wait for an unknown amount of time for a Walmart employee to bring it out to my car (been more than 10 to 15min a few times).
So basically, I pay extra to avoid that volatility in time to run that errand, and I do more work for it.
And I'm glad to stay outside.
I rarely shop at Wal-Mart. There's only a few things that I buy there.
One of those things is motor oil: Their online pricing for 5 quarts of full-synthetic whatever is usually impossible to beat.
The only catch is that you have to go to the store, park outside, and wait for someone to bring it out. Going inside the store to buy it in person often costs several dollars more (and those dollars count towards the next cheeseburger).
It seems completely asinine for it to be this way, and I feel completely silly waiting outside for someone to bring me a single jug of motor oil and hand it to me through my car window, but it's very clear that they don't want me in the store.
And I'm cheap. So I play their game and let them do it for me.
(It's usually very fast for me, so there's that.)
I find your Wal-Mart anecdote interesting, because the chain supermarket that I use is the exact opposite.
I buy the same items from the same store every two weeks (then supplement at neighborhood stores). Sometimes I shop in-store, and sometimes I get delivery. But the two-week shopping list is so unchanging that I even use the shopping list on the delivery web site when I'm walking through the aisles.
Because of this, I notice that the supermarket charges more for products being delivered than those retrieved in-store. Sometimes it's enough that I'll text my wife a picture of the price tag in the store, followed by a screenshot from the store's delivery web site.
Recently from memory, a 12-pack of ginger ale was about $3 more for delivery than in the store. But I'd say overall, probably 80% of the items I buy regularly are cheaper in the store.
These days, I only get things delivered if I have other significant obligations that warrant paying a 10% delivery markup, plus the delivery fee, plus a tip.
I think the price discrepancy between in-store and delivery is the reason that so many supermarkets I've been to recently (and also Macy's) have zero cell phone service under their roofs.
(i do recall the chatter that this was their way to compete with publix, although I don't know anyone who actually used it.)
In the AI analogy, never underestimate the productivity of a human when dealing with a giant pile of groceries. You can throw all the AI and robots you can at something but sometimes a $20 an hour human picking from stacks of goods and produce simply destroys it in raw economics
For example, imagine you had an upscaled pneumatic tube system (don't get hung up on the exact implementation, it could be a small gauge train system or conveyer belt: whatever floats your Factorio-addled boat) with a diameter around, say, half a metre to a metre, packed goods into canisters and shot into town where they pop out at local distribution centres for pickup or last-mile delivery.
This is where I thought the Boring Company might be going back before it was obvious it was an anti-public transit gambit.
Possibly the curse of rail systems applies where the maintenance of the track (tube) costs so much that it's cheaper to fly (done delivery) or drive all the way on public roads (current solution). The advantage over rail is that the land footprint is very small: the tract is about a metre wide and can be buried if needed. Perhaps it's just not really different enough to trucking it all into town using semi trailers, which would still be required for large items and especially construction materials.
Then again, even if this hare-brained system were to work, this assumes we actually want to continue to reduce most human commercial interactions to gigantic, remote, anonymous capital-intensive megasystems producing pods that pop out of the ground into robotic vending stations.
Even if it was a good idea (which I doubt, it's just a idle thought), I don't think there's a practical way to retrofit such a system in existing cities due to the costs, planning and presumably private funding for a non-public network, because the public road system exists, needs to continue to exist for large items and can be used for virtually free in comparison. So if/when the depot-to-neighbourhood leg is automated, it's much more likely we'll see drone vehicles on the road or occasionally in the air instead of dedicated pipeline-like delivery systems.
Even without the pipeline, you can conceive of self-diving heavy vehicles pulling up next to local delivery hubs and disgorging thousands of shipping pods into a robotic receiver. From there they either get picked up, droned, Starship'ed, cycled, whatever to the eventual front door. It's still possible just having then self-drive right to the door would turn out cheaper.
Sounds very sterile as an experience, but really it's only an optimisation of the small, but highly distributed, remaining segment of inefficiency in the existing global machine that already converts raw materials to a widget or food and gets it to within 100 miles of your house.
Sounds like the sort of idea a con man would pitch. Oh wait...
But presumably it turned out that actually Herrenknecht and Hitachi aren't stupid, whereas, say, Boeing had been leaving opportunity for radical cost reduction on the table.
That's not the case for drilling. The Boring Company has no clear proposition about how they would reduce their costs.
They have 4 CFCs and 15-20 "spokes".
There may also be an issue with logistics when it comes to making sure the machines keep running if there is a problem. They can barely keep the ice cream machines running.
Maybe they're just following the trends their own numbers tell them are happening, but I don't think they trust robotics enough to put an area they truly care about under its purview just yet.
But I’ve read they’re effective, apparently, in consistently upselling compared to a human, so I’m guessing that’s their play.
Despite the math working out insanely well for self service checkout, sometimes the gamble still doesn't pay off and the single employee burns through 4 carts faster than 6 self service checkout kiosks.
Costco does pretty good here though, drug stores go slow as hell.
Any reason to like the old way is just nostalgia in my head.
Indeed, but not at McDonalds.
Guess I was right.
Honestly the main problem seems to be most people just don't like buying certain items online, and that doesn't seem to be changing quickly. If Covid didn't break people out of that, I can't think of anything that will.
And FWIW, I think for an online only supermarket you'd expect their website to be pretty amazing, but their competitors are just as good.
(As an aside, they also have some of the best meat and produce you can get in the city without going to a farmers market. So many retail grocery stores here lack loading docks, the food handling getting from the truck to the sidewalk to the basement of the store to the shelves is really, really rough especially during the summer months. Skipping that and going warehouse-to-home has advantages)
I associate it more with delivery vans that seem to be in no particular hurry (unlike uber eats / DPD / UPS etc)
It is possible, but you end up spending 10x as much on the building.
Lots of big cities have grocery stores with parking garages under them, doesn’t seem much different.
Also, the backstock is minimal. Stores are designed for turnaround.
Retail stores are logistics. And part of that is product flow. There are trucks coming in every single day. When you buy an item at a store, that item is deducted from the store's inventory, when that item's stock reaches a certain threshold, an order is immediately placed to the distribution center, and that item is loaded onto a truck and could arrive as soon as that night.
There's no reason to keep anything "in the back" except for high demand items that aren't brought in by a vendor and overflow from items that didn't quite fill a shelf.
Bread/snack cakes (Little Debbie, the bakery also does bread), chips, soda, and liquor/beer are typically handled by vendors. Coca-Cola has a guy come out and stock the Coca-Cola products. Frito-Lay has a guy handle the Frito-Lay products. Etc. They don't work for the store in any capacity.
Vendors typically come during the normal operating hours of the store. Bread guys like to be early in the morning. Chip and soda guys have routes and they'll get to you depending on how the rest of their route goes.
As for other stock, for the grocery side, the distribution center usually palletize stock based on aisle. And the pallets come shrinkwrapped on a truck that arrives at the store between 8 and 10. Someone from the store unloads the pallets from the truck into the warehouse. Once the truck is unloaded, they head back to the distribution center. At the store, the pallets are then staged near their respective aisles and workers restock the shelves overnight.
On the general goods side, the stock is loose in the truck, and a team of people unload the truck and palletize it based on department. Then those pallets are staged in the department for stocking by the overnight crew.
Source: my first job was with WalMart. I worked day stock in a few departments on both the grocery and general goods sides. I worked unloading the trucks on the general goods side. I also worked overnight on the general goods side. I've been involved with a good portion of the store side of the restocking. So all of this information is at least 20 years old, some things may have changed. But I've seen the vendors still while I'm shopping, so the broad strokes likelys till apply.
I assumed it was that and that they are there basically every day. Always notable on the days when a snow storm is announced and bread will be completely wiped out. Only to be fully stocked the next day.
The store is the warehouse and the store owner is allowing self service inside the warehouse but not at checkout.
Having robots means you're automating something that your customers would have done for free. The automation is an additional expense and does not reduce your operating costs.
The online grocery business model only works for two types of customers: those who are willing to pay a premium for convenience and those who need some specialty products that local grocers don't sell.
The first market is a competitor to doordash, this either means automating the in-store pickup or the delivery itself.
The second market is actually a drag on your local grocery stores. You don't want to carry niche products that are only interesting to a tiny portion of your market e.g. products for rare food intolerances, groceries for expats. If you want to carry them in your store, you'd want the customer to preorder them themselves, so you know exactly how much you need and then make them pick them up.
Basically the correct business model is in-house doordash (or B2B doordash) combined with preorders.
Ultimately, I was pointing out why a two story grocery store with a "warehouse" on top doesn't make sense. A place to put stuff is not the issue for retail.
But, what you wrote there is a fair way to look at the core issue for Kroger.
The answer is $. It costs too much and land is cheaper than building up (In most places).
The ones in Bellaire and Meyerland are two level with parking (aka flooding space) below the store and a smaller parking lot on the second level with the store. Bellaire also has a fancy fuel cell setup for some reason. The single level HEB in Montrose(ish) was built into the site of an old complex of charming but nearly abandoned standalone quad/duplexes with many mature oaks. They seem to have retained nearly all of the trees on the grounds in greenspaces within the parking lot and entryway.
Here's some street view of Montrose. They also had a bike air and repair system when it opened. I'm not certain if it stayed in good repair itself. https://maps.app.goo.gl/KxHAvDqKca4E8L8a7
I don't know what success looks like but it's probably fair to say they were over-extended by roughly 30-40%.
https://chainstoreage.com/kroger-pay-350-million-automation-...
I'm also skeptical it'll ever work in America due to the general lack of density.
Not quite. Packed yes, but for many vegetables they have both item count and weight-based packages, e.g. "4 potatoes" vs "1kg potatoes".
I think that strikes the right balance.
Basically, each section is like a closed areas with some windows. Customers order at the computers by the windows and flash their membership cards. Robots glide left and right to move 10 samples to the customer, in an arm with rotating clips. Customers can press a button to rotate the samples, observe them, and place an order by pressing a button. Samples not chosen are temporarily stocked at the window as a “stack”.
In each closed section, there are humans who monitors and maintains the robots, and occasionally fetch samples when robots stop working (hopefully it too often, you know those 9s).
At the exit, a human worker assembles the packages and hand them to the customers with a smile. Customers have a last chance to return unwanted items.
Why was it a retro futuristic dream? Because the customers have the option to go into a bakery to enjoy a cup of coffee/tea, some cake and socialize with fellow customers. All of them looked like the men and women from advertisement from Fallout 4.
I’d like to shop or even help build one of these.
TBH, now that I think about it, the dream was way more vague than what I described in the reply. My brain probably reasoned about the idea subconsciously.
The only exception in warehouse was the cafeteria. I guess my brain wanted to make something retro futuristic so it made the cafeteria “retro” — manned by humans and cooked by humans too. There were even balloons inside now that I recall…
Basically a catalogue store without shipping to your door.
IKEA is kind of like that also, but you have to get everything yourself after picking it out upstairs. And Sears might have been like this at some point before I was born.
>In the 1990s, Consumers Distributing struggled to compete with Zellers and then Walmart Canada. Consumers Distributing sought bankruptcy protection in 1996.
And Zellers went under just a few years ago...
If you pre-order it's waiting at the desk. Very handy for people who can order from the job site on the account and send the lad round to grab it.
And a (relatively) unshittified website too because if jobbing tradies can't use the damn thing because it's too loaded down with ads and bullshit, they just won't.
I do research price, though, so if they show a big DISCOUNT sign and is more or less honest with it, I'll probably grab some, too.
Then in the 90s they were all washed away by the new ones.
[1] https://rarehistoricalphotos.com/keedoozle-automated-store-p...
It's not hard to imagine that if a fundamentally similar store today that took the world by storm, there would be a profusion of news stories asserting that the founder is a genius visionary, with nary a peep for Clarence Saunders et al.
Here’s my idea: instant teleportation.
I expect to be credited
Or to give a real-world example: The Wright brothers did some great work on making aircraft steerable and doing wind-tunnel tests, but working planes were mostly a product of ICE engines finally reaching sufficient power-to-weight ratios, not of the Wright brothers being unique geniuses. In a long line of people trying to build heavier-than-air aircraft they were simply the first to have access to the necessary technology to make it work
Arguably this model has a great deal of compatibility with robotic compact storage, especially in high-land-value areas.
> Piggly Wiggly was the first self-service grocery store.
These are featured in several cultural references, such as the 1962 Delbert Mann film That Touch of Mink, and PDQ Bach's "Concerto for Horn and Hardart" (being named after a prominent New York City automat chain).
Mink: <https://yewtu.be/watch?v=Y3GXMB4VPY8>
Concerto: <https://yewtu.be/watch?v=NT6bxlnS1Is>
Here is the story
https://www.facebook.com/100064532630592/posts/pfbid0DYoPXet...
Looking at the details, I could say Kroger shouldn't have hired her but I'd rather say that if she was dangerous enough to not hire as a driver then her license shouldn't have been reinstated in the first place. (Though that's if "couldn’t recall if her driver’s license was suspended just months before he hired her" means it actually was suspended, and Bike Law isn't doing some trickery with wording.)
Either way good they paid out.
For the shutdown, I do think it's a coincidence. They're shutting down facilities in multiple states and that lawsuit isn't even a tenth of a percent of the relevant costs.
> Fenyo added that Kroger’s decision to locate the Ocado centers outside of cities turned out to be a key flaw.
They over-spent on automating low-volume FCs. You could draw comparisons to Amdahl's law, they optimised the bit that wasn't the issue, the real issue was delivery distances and times.
Ocado has had good success with the robotics approach in the UK, because the UK is very high density compared to a lot of the US. Plus Ocado put a lot of work into creating good delivery routes, whereas it sounds like that wasn't a component of the automation stack that Kroger bought.
Robotics for picking and the general feasibility of grocery delivery in the US.
Ocado is good because their stock levels are far more accurate than the other supermarkets for online ordering, so you don't get as many substituted/missing items. This is sort of a side effect of having dedicated picking facilities Vs "real" supermarkets. I would not be surprised if they "lose" less stock as well compared to in supermarket fulfillment.
Then you have "is online grocery good in the US"? There's a lot of areas of the US that have reasonable density for this kind of service imo, and the road infrastructure is generally far superior to the UK which negates any loss of density (as you care about time between deliveries, not distance per se). I imagine the much better parking options in most suburbs in the US also helps efficiency (it's an absolute nightmare for a lot of the online delivery cos when there isn't off street parking in the UK and they have to park pretty far from the drop).
It sounds to me that Kroger just messed up the execution of this in terms of "marketing" more than anything.
Just the model. They optimized for tax outcomes. They obviously wanted in on the "Amazon race to the bottom" game.
https://www.leesburg-news.com/2025/11/30/kroger-took-incenti...
> the real issue was delivery distances and times.
Which they could care less about. Where else are you going to go?
> You didn’t have enough people ordering, and you had a fair amount of distance to drive to get the orders to them
It's clearly not a technology problem, but it was made worse by heavily investing in robotics for locations that already couldn't sustain a fulfillment center.
According to the article, there were several strategic blunders, including trying the model outside of cities where lack of density cut against it. Plus the apparent dismissal any value their 2700 retail locations could provide.
As far as I can tell, Kroger didn’t acknowledge anything except a change in strategy.
Unsure how the headlines doesn't align. Maybe it's different than what I'm seeing:
> Kroger acknowledges that its bet on robotics went too far
This I guess is Robo Kroger.
A weird, dark, maze-like warehouse-feeling Kroger that just closed.
We have a really nice Kroger a bit outside town. I always think of it as the Gucci Kroger.
A college-kid, cheaper Kroger close to the center of town. The cheaper version of the Harris Teeter nearby.
There's as much variation in individual Krogers as between other grocery chains!
... As in the supermarket had a disco ball? Was it spinning?
Unlike Publix if I see a discount I know it is a discount. Every other item in Kroger has a yellow tag and a red price to make you think you are getting a deal when in fact the red number is higher than regular price at normal stores.
Ocado does just fine though, and are rarely the cheapest choice.
Tesco used to use plastic box liners which you doing just hoick out, but those were quickly stopped due to bring plastic.
I'd rather they just handed over the crates or something and I could return them for a deposit the next time. Obviously I'd also rather all the supermarkets could share the same crates so I don't have to babysit piles of each brand separately.
Maybe Ocado have a better system then Tesco here?
You are charged for the bags (in the UK you have to charge 5p for plastic bags) but are refunded when you return them (during a later delivery).
Kroger should have pulled a Wal-Mart and turned to their shrink-heavy stores in urban centers to online fulfillment only -- basically only their delivery drivers can retrieve items for an order, and everything's shopped by an associate (Look south of the MicroCenter in Dallas if you want to see what one looks like: it still has the Murphy USA in the parking lot and is basically an unbranded walmart building with 'driver' and 'associate' entrances -- and then deployed the robotics there: less retail space, more online/fulfillment capacity (have humans grab produce and custom sliced/packed items, robots pick the dry goods), and while you lose some cashier jobs, you'll probably have net improvement in terms of time waiting to be picked.
You could also count shoe stores and high-end jewelry and watch stores in that the clerk has to go in the back to fetch the non-display model.
Graybar[1], for instance: There's a counter with bar stools, and behind that counter are people who know their inventory very well.
I just walk in and tell them what I want. They write it all down on paper faster than I can say the words and then disappear into the back to fetch it while I help myself to a free ice cream sandwich from the freezer over on the right that one of the local trade unions provides.
[1]: Graybar is a US-based electrical supply place. The companies I work for have accounts there, but as far as I know anyone can walk in and buy stuff. They also have some datacom stuff. If I'm in the middle of Nowhere, Ohio and need, say, a single-mode patch cord today, then there's probably a Graybar less than an hour away that has one in stock. Otherwise, they'll have one for me tomorrow before 7:00AM.
...with the caveat that McMaster's facilities are staffed by people, not robots.
Log into website, fill the cart, pick a time window, and push the button to order it. Someone starts working on it nearly instantly. The order is picked and waiting in a few minutes.
It's fast as fuck. Except...
---
If someone at Kroger ever reads this, then:
That time window aspect is the part of the system falls down hard for me.
Before I order, I have to pick a window in the future when I want to pick it up/get it delivered.
"I'm ready when you are; ASAP" isn't an option. Nor is "I'm already in the parking lot, you bunch of dweebs -- just bring my stuff out. Please?"
So if it's 6:05 when I order and the next window starts at 8:00, and they're fast as fuck (as they are) and have it done in less than 15 minutes, then: I'm waiting around for more than an hour and a half for nothing.
Because until the apparently-completely-arbitrary window is reached: It won't let me check in to pick up. It won't schedule a driver. My groceries are just sitting there (ideally stored at the right temperature but I can't know this) at the store while some wallclock mechanism that was designed by an asshole runs out.
This makes the whole thing feel clunky, stupid, and insulting.
It results a system that I use only when I absolutely do not want to be inside of a grocery store, like when I'm sick as hell in January and every body part hurts. Any other time, it's way faster for me to go in the store and shop it myself.
It should be convenient. It is instead almost always a burden instead of a benefit.
If picking up a pizza from Domino's worked like this, then they'd have gone completely out of business decades ago.
1. Prices on the app are frequently higher than prices in the store. 2. Not all options available in the store are available in the app. 3. Don't assume they'll always have it ready on time. Or, at least, don't plan your day around it.
They force you to pick a window because stores have limited staffing, and only so many orders can be fulfilled at once. "Hire more people," you say? Hah!
We don't do delivery, so I can't comment on that aspect of the service.
And most of the process is very similar between Domino's and Kroger.
Just pick out a selection of stuff on a website, and order it. They both provide timely status updates of that order. They both have varying staff levels and workloads. They both certainly have days when they're running very far behind, and days when they feel like they don't have much to keep busy with.
They both have pickup and delivery options; sometimes, with different per-item prices, deals, or fees for each option.
But that's where the similarities end.
If a person orders a pizza at 6:05 and it happens to be ready by 6:30, Domino's doesn't make that person wait until 8:00 to pick it up. They want it gone; the sooner, the better. A person can pick it up (in the store, or they'll bring it out to the car) as soon as it is ready. Domino's does not want any queues at all; neither inbound, nor outbound. And this makes sense: They're in the business of selling pizzas, not storing pizzas.
Kroger isn't like that. If a person orders groceries at 6:05 and the order is ready by 6:30, then: They hold the groceries hostage until 8:00. It's as if an otherwise-complete order just isn't ripe to be picked up by a customer until it has had time to purge itself in a waiting area -- regardless of workload. The queue is mandatory, and is governed not by the physical readiness of the order but instead by the clock on the wall.
This is inconceivably stupid and unnecessary. It serves no benefit to me, nor to the corporation, nor to the employees that work for that corporation. One might think that they'd be aware that they're in the business of selling groceries, but this mandatory purgatory shows otherwise.
(I'll betcha McMaster-Carr doesn't sit on stuff while a clock runs. That's a Kroger specialization. :) )
honestly, i wouldn't shop at this store, i want to get the items myself, without any interaction. interactions add delays.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Service_Merchandise
I have never been to one because they went out of business decades ago.
The thing that's wrong with Ocado's technology is that it's ridiculously expensive and tailored for huge FC's (fulfillment centers). The problem with that is that it needs to serve a large population base to be effective and that's hard - in dense metros, the driving times are much longer despite smaller distances. In sparse metros, the distances are just too long. In our experience, the optimal FC size is 5-10K orders/day, maybe up to 20K/day in certain cases, but the core technology should certainly scale down profitably to 3-5K. Ocado solves for scaling up, what needs to be solved is actually scaling down.
There are a lot of logistical challenges outside the FC, especially last mile and you need to see the system as a whole, not just optimize one part to the detriment of all others.
deja-vu from the e-scooter business. even with a good product, its just not profitable/scalable enough
I think scaling up would be the only way out of this problem. Scaling down only makes it worse.
The margins are thin, but not as razor thin as you might think. The grocery stores have a lot of overhead that we don't. Additionally, people realize that not only is that the case, but they also save from their own costs - just driving to the store is not free, let alone the time you spend, which is massively cut down.
Unfortunately, auto.ol shared secrets with them, Ocado abused that in court.
Literally, Fuck Ocado. I wouldn't trust them.
Autostore ended up paying Ocado? How did Ocado abuse them?
Note: Ocado was a customer of Autostore in 2012 and just copied them. Sharing IP basically invalidated the lawsuit.
Autostore disclosed their design externally before the patents. So the patents were "invalidated" by themselves
AutoStore claimed that several of its European patents covering cube-storage robots and grid-based systems were infringed by Ocado’s Smart Platform robots and storage grid. The judge looked closely at the “central cavity” robot patents (EP 2 928 794 and EP 3 070 027) and two other related patents and compared them to earlier disclosures and designs. He found that the claimed inventions lacked novelty and/or an inventive step, meaning they did not add enough new technical idea over what was already publicly available, so the patents were revoked.
Additionally, even if the patents were not invalidated, the judge found that Ocado did not infringe them, even if they were valid. Specifically, Ocado’s robots and grid as actually built and used did not fall within the wording of AutoStore’s patent claims. The court concluded that, on proper claim construction, Ocado’s design did not use several key features required by the claims, so there was no infringement in any event.
This is all in the judgment.
Finally, Autostore had to pay Ocado $256M USD: https://www.therobotreport.com/autostore-to-pay-ocado-256m-i...
However, Danish supermarkets are generally kept small by regulation, meaning that there are very few supermarket that could be considered big by international standards.
Most people don't live in city centers. Because they are the most expensive places to live in.
This is village with a population of a bit less than 3000, which I only know about because I have walked East-West across most of the state of Brandenburg (from Słubice in Poland to the city of Brandenburg) and this trains station was a convenient break point:
https://www.google.com/maps/@52.3459295,14.2800967,3a,60y,14...
Here's Aberystwyth, where I did my degree, population 13k, nearby villages boost that by about 6k, students by another 8k:
https://www.google.com/maps/@52.4145833,-4.0848806,3a,75y,19...
I grew up on the south coast of the UK. Which is certainly expensive overall, but it has cheap areas like Leigh Park which used to be entirely council houses (i.e. made for poor people and run by the local council):
https://www.google.com/maps/place/Leigh+Park,+Havant,+UK/@50...
The other two show pedestrianised areas, and all three show pedestrians without any indication of how they go there. When I to to similar areas in my town (pop approx 23k) I have drive there, park, and then walk around.
I have several shops within easy walking distance and many people (including me) do walk to them, but quite a few drive. Few bikes (kids mostly) at shops although leisure cycling is VERY popular here.
One of the nice things about an edge of town area with its own identity as a village is we have a lot of local stuff which is walkable and friendly.
Yes, and? "Cars are popular" is not a surprising claim that anyone has been contradicting, so far as I can see. (Also, Aberystwyth is tiny enough to get around entirely on foot, and hilly enough that bikers have to be exceptionally fit, and yet despite this, bike racks).
> The other two show pedestrianised areas, and all three show pedestrians without any indication of how they go there.
The Edeka in Briesen is one of the other two, I don't see a pedestrianised area, do you mean the car park owing to the open-air market set up in it?
The other one (Leigh Park) is literally in the middle of a typical UK conurbation with, as is normal in the UK, approximately universal pedestrian access. People can walk there easily from their homes, they can cycle, they can drive, they might even take a bus. One thing they're really not likely to do is come from very far away, because the only people who know about Leigh Park are the adjacent parts of the conurbation and they mostly look up their noses at it because it's poor.
My point is that it is not "shops with bike racks" that are the alternative to online groceries, it is a mix that definitely involves more use of cars than bikes, plus probably more walking and public transport than bikes too.
To your point, I agree, it's definitely not just bikes: I could bike to my local stores, I actually walk most of the time. With the "e.g."/"exclusive" split: Back when I was commuting, I did so by bus and train, and would also often go via a shop on the way home. The Briesen example is close to the train station, so my guess is that many of the locals would do likewise.
I'd go further though, we do order online about once every 6-8 weeks, because bulk purchasing 18 litres of soy milk and another 9 of long-life cow milk that way is more convenient than frequent small purchases at the same time as the perishables.
I never had a car in London, and would not want to drive in central London. Public transport is faster, less tiring, and while not cheap, is cheaper than running a car.
Living in Cheshire a car is a necessity.
Like a lot of people who work from home there is big difference between the time required to shop, and taking a few minutes away from my desk to get some stuff from the door to the fridge.
I visit those local shops once or twice almost every day to pick up fresh bits and pieces - but I still get bulky or heavy stuff delivered by Ocado (toilet roll, washing powder, everyday wine, that sort of thing).
Sure, you have Doordash-style same-hour options which are largely based on someone picking stuff up from a local store on your behalf (we have lots of those too). But the Ocado/Kroger robotic hive fulfilment centres ought to be more efficient than that whilst offering higher quality by cutting out the labour-intensive warehouse -> store -> shelf -> checkout part of the process.
I think some of it comes from a feeling of "that can't possibly work", perhaps as a hangover from the failure of Webvan during the dotcom boom. Maybe with some "well, I have to use my car for everything else, so I might as well use it to collect groceries too" layered on top.
Which all points to it being a fairly intractable problem - there are a bunch of only tangentially-related issues that need sorting out before it can be become a widespread success.
Replacing the regional distribution center instead with even higher levels of automation, and getting your groceries delivered from the same warehouse the supermarket is, would give you the scale from the start... but then that increases your frontend delivery costs and more importantly your frontend delivery latency; High latency is a much worse thing with milk than with books or hammers.
To be fair, though, the bulk of Ocado's initial investors were from the retail and finance worlds - and the difference between the US and UK is smaller in those fields than it is for tech.
How do people in your area generally get groceries?
For people in the outer suburbs where that's not an option, I don't know why a service hasn't arisen where you can plug in, "we have X adults living here, they average Y meals per week made at home, we want Z grams of protein per meal, here's our dietary restrictions, solve that system of equations out of whatever's in your warehouse and take a flat rate for delivery and percentage for your overhead." The pure delivery services all seem to be plays to hide huge prices behind tricky introductory rates. Both my local supermarkets offer delivery and presumably have the data to make that possible but they want me to still pick individual items in a vastly worse interface (any website or app) than the experience of standing in a dry goods aisle.
Instead of having to fight with a machine to give back my empty cans/plastic bottles, I can just give the delivery person a crate and get my money back.
Doesn't capture all my groceries, I love biking or walking to a smaller shop on occasion, or if I have a specific craving, but 90% of my groceries is delivery.
Still, they are popular.
But also, definitely not the Ocado model.
I live in the U.S. and have almost never used a service like Instacart. Also, when I see the item I’m trying to order in Amazon is fulfilled by Whole Foods, I typically don’t buy it, because of the additional cost.
I’d rather suffer a small amount of inconvenience to save several dollars on groceries, and often it may mean that I may need to order a different brand to pick up a similar item at a local store.
However, I’ll gladly pay a little additional money for Amazon for many other items, because it’s convenient, shipping is included in Prime, and because I can get what I want.
I make the majority of my retail purchases at a supermarket, followed by Amazon online (Prime only), then a very small percentage in-person at Target, Walmart, or a hardware/home supplies store or some random online retailer.
The best I can do to “shop local” is to use a supermarket chain; there is no mom-and-pop to support that isn’t a chain unless it’s a restaurant. I don’t pretend that this is actually “shopping locally”.
I’ve only participated in a boycott once or twice, because there is typically a practical reason for shopping when and where I do- either I need to shop then because I don’t get out much, or there’s a sale with actually lower prices, rather than the frequent “increase the price just to cut it to get you to order more” thing, which I also get sucked into, because I don’t have time to price shop, unless it’s with camelcamelcamel for Amazon.
They’ll ship me a $10 <thing my project needs> almost always for free and often next day, sometimes same day. And their prices are competitive in general with Amazon and supplyhouse.com.
I don’t know that it’s a great (or even sustainable) offering from their business angle, but I love it as a consumer and DIYer!
They are a bigger fish than the mom and pop stores but that just means that it will take a little longer for the Amazon Prime monopoly cash flow to devour it.
The idea of paying a subscription for the privilege of being scammed sounds ridiculous. The cost of deliveries doesn't magically go down because you're paying a subscription. You're paying for it either way. Either you're overpaying on the subscription because you're not ordering enough or you're overpaying in the form of higher prices that contain the remaining delivery fee.
Sure, if you do a full accounting of costs you may win or lose, but fundamentally people are paying for simplicity. Because almost everyone is lazy, or too busy, or too afraid of random scammers, or whatever, and they played their cards right to become the Sears Catalog from the 19th century in the 21st century.
edit - and one thing that helped them get there is the return policy, so if you get one of those scam sellers, or they sent you wrong crap, opened crap, or just plain everyday crap, you press a couple buttons, maybe drop something off at a UPS store, and problem solved. That definitely shields them from the fallout from their endless listings from sellers like QWERTY123 and ZXCVBN789, and provides an advantage over any other online ordering that doesn't have the same massive advantage of scale.
Predictable delivery, easy/generous customer service, best/tied-for-best price, excellent selection. I'm not sure which part of that is uncompetitive...
(If you know a better price on Airpods 3 Pro or a base M4 Air, do let me know as I'm always happy to save money.)
The prices on amazon are comparable to what I see elsewhere for everything I've ordered. The thing that sets amazon apart is that their delivery is blazing fast compared to everyone else. Yes, the reviews are always a little suspect, if I see tons of empty 5 star reviews, I suspect the product, but in general, I've been satisfied with my purchases.
I’ve been buying on Amazon for 20 years, and I just avoid high value items. It’s great as an AliExpress with an easy return policy. If I get a fake or whatever, I return it or I toss it.
For higher value items, I go to other retailers, such as Costco.
1) When I really need it within a couple of days and can't quickly find it locally
2) When it isn't carried locally (the local retail stock is a lot thinner than 20 years ago)
3) If there is a BIG price difference -- used to be common but now much rarer. As you say, Amazon's prices are often worse than buying locally.
4) When I need it shipped somewhere else. I usually spend Christmas, for example in another city, and it is impractical to bring a bunch of presents. Amazon is good for situations like that.In general, I prefer buying local, because it makes my community healthier -- more jobs, directly and indirectly, more options to buy something this afternoon if I really need it. But the reality is that many items are already very difficult to buy. Some of that was true 20 years ago, but it's gotten much worse.
Self checkout is fine for small trips, but expecting people to do so for a cart full of groceries is ridiculous. This trend started at walmart but has started moving up the chain to higher priced stores. I just flatly refuse to do the grocer's work for them when I'm not actually saving any money at checkout for doing so.
All juices/waters/beers/wines, paper towels, lots of oranges/grapefruits, cleaning products like bleach/detergent, etc. When they carry them up to your fourth-floor door it's just so much easier.
The smallish shops are good for stuff you can then easily carry in a bag by hand -- meat, veg, cheese, fresh bread.
For instance, I called in to the patisserie this morning on a whim to treat myself to a pain au chocolat for breakfast. And I think I fancy cheese for dinner, so after work I'll nip out to the deli for some stilton and the greengrocer for walnuts and figs to go with it. I've already got fancy crackers and some good port from my last online delivery so that's everything I need for dinner.
I'm used to being able to pick stuff up according to what I feel like eating on the day. Yeah, it wouldn't be a huge quality of life reduction to have to plan meals in advance but why bother if I don't have to?
Plus, when I'm working from home, it keeps me from being entirely sedentary on a miserable, drizzly winter's day when I might not otherwise have bothered leaving the house, so it has physical & mental health benefits too.
It's also one of the reasons I don't really like working from home.
When I was young, I worked in a couple of supermarkets. There were a lot of people who came in each day and bought one thing. Not because that's the one thing they needed that day, but because going to the supermarket was their only interaction with other human beings.
I was young, so I thought they were just poor planners. But there was this one guy who I knew would be in the dairy aisle at 4:35pm every day, and I started having his cup of yogurt ready for him when he walked through. It was he who explained to me why certain people were low-volume regulars.
Delivery is for less frequent things that last much longer.
Local ships are for more frequent things that spoil quickly.
And adding the heavier/bulkier things to my local trips, even in smaller quantities, just makes the bags too heavy and unwieldy in the end. I only have two hands. Plus it's way more expensive to buy paper towels as individual rolls than in packs of six.
It’s a more limited selection but there’s plenty to choose from and I’m done picking out my groceries in five minutes. They magically show up at my door for very little extra cost and I don’t have to bicker with my kids about grabbing a bunch of random stuff either.
I’m not saying you’re wrong for feeling that way, but you’d be surprised how much work it is to go to a grocery store, no matter how close it is. It’s important to think about other factors here.
I mean I'm not feeling any particular way; I don't have a problem with the neighbours using it. I'm somewhat surprised that it makes sense for them, but each to their own. Myself, I just shop on the way home from work (my walk brings me past one of the supermarkets).
I find tipping for grocery delivery adds pretty significantly to the cost.
And I've not yet been able to establish the right criteria to guess how a person is buying their groceries.
Location, age, income, number of people in the household, physical ability...
A single guy living in the city center with good income? Takes his car to go in big supermarket outside the city.
A family with four kids living in the suburbs? Goes everyday in the small shops.
Planners. The people who have a meal plan in Google Calendar for the next week and rarely have to "grab one thing on the way home from the store". The people who literally have no idea what they're eating on Thursday will go to the store today or tomorrow, who knows what they'll buy.
Multitaskers. The people who do their grocery shopping on the couch while not really watching TV, or similar downtime when its job #2. I used to shop online while theoretically cooking. It'll be five minutes until this is done I'll spend a couple minutes looking in the fridge for eggs / milk / etc and add to next weeks order.
A specific criteria I've found is people in general don't trust the delivery services for non-hyperprocessed food. I can trust a sealed bag of oreos is like every other mass produced food-adjacent substance. I want to select my own roast from whats on the shelf or my own apples. So people who only eat processed food products that come in plastic tend to like online ordering, people who mostly eat more natural food tend to dislike online ordering.
You have to know people pretty well to determine their project management style and their diet.
I'm a planner and that's one of the reasons I don't order my groceries. If there's one thing I know I can't rely on, it's to be delivered on schedule and/or receiving exactly what I ordered.
Meanwhile if I go to the store, I can find an alternative or go elsewhere if I can't find what I wanted.
And I'm also a "natural food" person, so I'd rather pick things myself. Furthermore, if I crush a fruit on my way home, it's on me and I'll deal with it peacefully. If I'm being delivered a crush fruit, I'll get mad at the company I ordered from and I'll have find a way to be compensated.
Like almost everything people complain about nowadays, this is not a tech problem, has never been a tech problem, and cannot be fixed with tech.
I think here in France the best example is Lidl. The stores are laid out the same, so not only your usual store doesn't change, but you can go to any store in the country and find what you want at the same spot.
Personally, with self-checkout, I spend less than 15mn in the store to do a week of groceries.
Thought differently most major chains capture all of this data and can optimize stores for sales.
I think the bigger complaint is a typical US grocery store carries an insane amount of SKUs. If I was just going to Trader Joe’s it’s no problem. Low sku count layouts never change. Walmart has probably 10x the skus and it’s a struggle sometimes just finding what you want. Oh I need dry dill, well in the spice section there are 3 or 4 brands. Within those sometimes it’s not in alphabetical order. Things are misplaced or just out of stock.
This has been solved by Pio (by AutoStore)
I can't imagine it's especially profitable to deliver a bag of food in a refrigerated van to somewhere that's nearly four hours driving each way.
They're actually worse than the motorhome brigade.
I think the big win with that model vs Ocado is that scaling down is fine, you work with whatever shops are in the area and don't need to deal with building fulfilment centres. Maybe you need a car park somewhere to put the vans overnight. Scaling up is a case of moving into different areas, or onboarding new shops. Absolutely agreed that last mile is a nightmare but we mostly had it down I think, the biggest pain there was that we were relying on a bunch of third parties to pack an order, and if any of them got something wrong we ended up with an unhappy customer on the phone and needing to deal with it.
Why not have drivers verify the order with the store? Like have the store folks walk through the pick ups. It might be slower up front, but it would save lots of time and money for everyone in the long run. One of those slow is smooth and smooth is fast situations. Alternatively, the drivers should have a book they could match pics to items perhaps
The other thing I wonder if it would be possible, would be to reduce revenue share for stores that routinely had issues with accuracy, but that means you'd need leverage, and you simply may not have it.
This is one of the most basic functions that a delivery service should have: making sure that you get the items you ordered, in good shape.
There are a number of extremely difficult problems that are definitionally insurmountable on the timescales that VC operates -- paramount among them being the establishment of trust and mutualistic relationships with your vendors/stores, customers, and employees.
You are right that there is such a space, it just won't happen in the context of a startup taking VC cash.
This contrasts sharply with being an innovator in the robotics space, which typically is extremely capital intensive with very long ROI trajectories.
The title is a red herring.
We have done grocery pickup for years but the pickup lanes are almost always empty while dozens of shoppers walk into the store.
To me, shopping for groceries by hand is a waste of time but it clearly has some utility for a lot of people.
I wonder if that inertia is making traditional grocery shopping stickier than it should be and disincentivizing optimization.
I hope consumer tastes will change because there’s no reason for us to all walk into a giant warehouse every week.
Purchasing online feels more narrow and has me thinking more about things I've cooked before vs what I might want to try cooking/eating.
Online retailers UIs are all extremely bad for browsing. One would imagine they would be better, because they can reorganize any way they want, without any limitation, personalize it to each customer, and have several different organizations at the same time available for people to pick what's best each time.
But no, browsing universally sucks.
The really confusing part is the parent company's website (Albertsons) works just fine, though it is also slow.
It happens on so many kinds of store, it's baffling.
Shopping for food is important to me because food is important to me, and I have no desire to change this despite how "inefficient" it may be. This attitude has already very nearly optimized out most of the texture of daily life to no benefit that is apparent to me.
A guitarist doesn't just buy some random guitar from amazon - they see it in person and play it. If you cook and care about your food, using a food service just isn't something you'll want to do.
And even if you are completely sure on what you want in advance, having someone else do it is not always great. At least with Instacart, the person doing the shopping frequently didn't know where something was and just assumed it was 'out' and tried to substitute it (badly). There was all this awful delay and back-and-forth and crappy picures with the person shopping to try to get the right thing.
Doing it yourself doesn't have that problem. You know what you want, why you want it, and what you're willing to bend on. No, X brand cheese is not a substitute for Y branch I wanted, never do that. But yes, Z brand and type of milk is fine compared to what I wanted and I know they are frequently out.
Grocery store employees aren't any better at this, btw. Especially since the stores like to re-arrange on a monthly basis.
Finally, walking into stores lets you connect to people. Those who repent and follow Jesus Christ are told to share His Gospel with strangers so they can be forgiven and have eternal life. We're also to be good to them in general, listening and helping, from the short person reaching for items too high to the cashier that needs a friendly word.
We, along with non-believers, also get opportunities out of this when God makes us bump into the right people at the right time. They may become spouses, friends, or business partners. It's often called networking. However, Christians are to keep in mind God's sovereign control of every detail. Many are one-time or temporary events or observations just meant to make our lives more interesting.
Most of the above isn't available in online ordering which filters almost all of the human experience down to a narrow, efficient process a cheap AI could likely do. That process usually has no impact on eternity for anyone. Further, it has less impact on other people. Then, I have less of the experiences God designed us to have. Which includes the bad ones that build our character, like patience and forgiveness.
So, while I prefer online shopping, I try to pray God motivate me to shop in stores at times and do His will in there. Many interestings things, including impacts on people, continue to happen. Some events hit the person so hard that, even as a non-believer, they know God was behind it. I'm grateful for these stores that provide these opportunities to us.
Sounds like there were some politics involved in the original decision.
I don't see a way around this using mere technology. Either the service quality will have to be low, or the cost will have to be prohibitively high, or the people providing the service will have to be very poor.
We have solutions going back centuries that work. If you need more than an occasional concierge service you hire a chef as an employee. At some point it makes more sense to hire a part time chef than to pay enormous extra fees for giant shopping robots. Perhaps the economic decline from AI will make the idea of having house servants more acceptable to the very few people still having an income. Most strategies to replace high labor cost people with technology miss the point of long term permanent economic decline. We don't have a problem of too many financially successful people LOL if anything the problem is a severe lack of them.
Its kind of like cars. You have to unperson poor people who know how to drive if you want success with computer driven cars. This is the same concept but for hiring a servant to cook.
Also its very hard to scale royalty. If only the local equivalent of royalty can afford to pay to make the effort required to shop and cook and drive disappear, its going to be hard to dotcom scale that to billions of customers if there's only a couple multimillionaires who don't care about the price.
Trying to automate food shopping is like trying to go back to full service gas stations. Nobody wants it so its an uphill battle to sell.
However, robotics that can navigate an existing retail grocery store is not here. yet.
Amazing that both opening and subsequently closing the facilities could provide a boost to profitability.
Someone didn't read the 26 year old Webvan case study at CEO-school.
From wikipedia,
"The cycloid, with the cusps pointing upward, is the curve of fastest descent under uniform gravity (the brachistochrone curve). It is also the form of a curve for which the period of an object in simple harmonic motion (rolling up and down repetitively) along the curve does not depend on the object's starting position (the tautochrone curve)."
So swinging a rack along the cycloid is the fastest motion without having to contribute energy (apart from that to overcome friction etc.).
So you can have a large number of racks in the "left" position, choose to open a passage between racks 34 and 35 by having all racks >=35 swing to the right position. In this way all N racks can be accessed with only the loss of space of a single planar passage.
If everything which enters is weighed before insertion, the loading and unloading could happen near reversibly by arming or releasing appropriate counterweights.
Kinetic energy can also be stored gravitationally: accelerate (by dropping the weight) and decelerate (by lifting it again) for quick motions.
Better design for the ultimate cost center, energy consumption.
AndrewKemendo•1d ago
That makes sense to me.
Feels like we’re going to have warehouse scale vending machines in cities, and delivery bots taking them from the warehouse-vending-machine to the customer.
recursive•1d ago
aerostable_slug•1d ago
Because tips are important to the income of delivery shoppers, I find that I generally get good produce selections. It might be difficult to transition that particular incentive to robots, but the point is that delivery items don't have to suck.
The only thing I really still pick out by hand every time are beef briskets. Pork shoulders tend to be uniform enough that randomly picking a cryovac works out, but there's a good bit of variation in brisket that makes a difference with the final product, at least when the brisket is prepared with a smoker. YMMV
recursive•1d ago
aerostable_slug•21h ago
In any event, delivery doesn't always mean the worst of the produce aisle, and while I noted that the incentive of tips might not transfer to robots, keeping repeat customers might be enough incentive for a way to be found to not make robots and grocery synonymous with only frozen food. That might mean human pickers; better automation on the food selection system; pre-inspected, washed and packaged fruits & veggies; etc.
mlrtime•23h ago
Wait, you tip to get a good selection of produce to be delivered to you? This is very bizarre to me.
aerostable_slug•21h ago
With Instacart & Costco memberships and also ordering from the local discount grocers, I can get food delivered for less than it costs to actually go to the mainstream grocery stores like Von's, and I don't get bruised eggplants or cilantro that's already going bad. The drivers/shoppers are generally quite good at picking out items that can lead to higher tips (that or they're just in it for the love of good produce, but either way you can often tell they're not randomly loading the bags).
simmonmt•11h ago
AlotOfReading•1d ago
acessoproibido•1d ago
cgriswald•10h ago