If we lived in a sane society, one of the first things that would have happened is that the President of the USA would have called the CEO of Instacart, the leaders of both parties in the House and the Senate, and the head of the NIH into the Oval Office and announced, "It is of utmost importance for reasons of national security to keep as many people as possible out of grocery stores. Let us figure out how much of this problem Instacart could solve for us, provided enough resources, and what it would take to keep their delivery people safe, and how big a check the Federal government needs to write to Instacart for them to make this happen for us."
In Wuhan, where gated hi-rise apartment complexes are common, I gather it was a thing that the management companies of apartment complexes were tasked with collecting the grocery orders of everyone in the complex who wanted groceries, and arranging to have them delivered all at once, like once a week. Payment through WeChat (IIRC), and each resident called down one at a time to get their delivery off the back of the truck.
I live in an apartment building that holds something like 100 people. We are all getting our groceries as separate households. This is incredibly wasteful and inefficient. Imagine if there were a way to batch Peapod deliveries, and they could send a whole truck with just the grocery orders for this one building. It would save a truly vast amount of driving, and consequently make it possible for them to serve (barring other bottlenecks) vastly more people with the same number of delivery drivers!
But there's no infrastructure to do that, and no will to develop that infrastructure. If the government had asked Peapod to arrange such a thing, particularly for the supportive housing apartment buildings for the disabled and elderly, but possibly even for all large apartment blocks, they might well have done it, especially if subsidized even a little. It could have gone a huge ways to keeping people out of groceries stores in the urban cores where the infection has been worst. It possibly even could be done without much backend infrastructure, just a building-specific "coupon code" that tells the system which building you're in and automatically schedules your order onto that truck, and the building/delivery schedule wrangled by hand with a special phone number only shared with building coordinators (whether prop managers, landlords, supers, or designated tenants) going to reserved CSAs.
We never even meaningfully tried to solve the problem of "How do we make it possible for people to keep out of the grocery stores? Particularly people that are exposed by presymptomatic, or mildly symptomatic, who aren't terribly motivated to submit to quarantine?"
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Date: 2020-05-06 08:18 am (UTC)In Wuhan, where gated hi-rise apartment complexes are common, I gather it was a thing that the management companies of apartment complexes were tasked with collecting the grocery orders of everyone in the complex who wanted groceries, and arranging to have them delivered all at once, like once a week. Payment through WeChat (IIRC), and each resident called down one at a time to get their delivery off the back of the truck.
I live in an apartment building that holds something like 100 people. We are all getting our groceries as separate households. This is incredibly wasteful and inefficient. Imagine if there were a way to batch Peapod deliveries, and they could send a whole truck with just the grocery orders for this one building. It would save a truly vast amount of driving, and consequently make it possible for them to serve (barring other bottlenecks) vastly more people with the same number of delivery drivers!
But there's no infrastructure to do that, and no will to develop that infrastructure. If the government had asked Peapod to arrange such a thing, particularly for the supportive housing apartment buildings for the disabled and elderly, but possibly even for all large apartment blocks, they might well have done it, especially if subsidized even a little. It could have gone a huge ways to keeping people out of groceries stores in the urban cores where the infection has been worst. It possibly even could be done without much backend infrastructure, just a building-specific "coupon code" that tells the system which building you're in and automatically schedules your order onto that truck, and the building/delivery schedule wrangled by hand with a special phone number only shared with building coordinators (whether prop managers, landlords, supers, or designated tenants) going to reserved CSAs.
We never even meaningfully tried to solve the problem of "How do we make it possible for people to keep out of the grocery stores? Particularly people that are exposed by presymptomatic, or mildly symptomatic, who aren't terribly motivated to submit to quarantine?"