Of all the grocery companies in my area, only Walmart has it right: Choose an available pick up time, then start online shopping.

All the others let you fill your cart, then at checkout tell you there are no slots available until the end of time. Waste of time, energy, and hope. F U, Target, Safeway, Albertsons, and Kroger.

Why is grocery delivery considered a ‘safer’ option than going to the store yourself. I actually prefer to do it myself. I’d rather be the one to lay hands on all my own products.

Why would you trust an unknown group of people to take all the proper precautions? Who picked the item by hand? Who is this bringing it to your door? Are you sure they washed hands? Did they accidentally sneeze on anything? Is the vehicle sanitary? Also, I would imagine people doing these jobs are probably at higher risk of being exposed, just by nature of traveling & being in public all the time.

I would rather trust my own skills to be responsible and protect myself, rather than other unknown entities to touch all my stuff. All the supermarkets I’ve been to have someone at the door sanitizing carts as the hand them too you. I am hyper aware of avoiding touch anything unnecessary. I can keep as much distance from people as I want. I know my hands are clean when I start, and then avoid touching my face until I sanitize after.

Young healthy people shouldn’t be doing this, the slots should go to the ill and elderly, people who are in immediate danger from catching the illness.

It seems like a lot of demand issues highlighted by the pandemic could be solved by queues. Instead of saying "there are no slots available", put the user in the queue. Process the queue in order. The improvement in wait time and demand accuracy would be a win for both consumers and the business.

I had to do the same thing to get an Amazon Fresh order. Well, not quite the same thing, I ended up writing an Selenium project that automated the Amazon Fresh checkout process till it got to a delivery window page that didn’t complain there were no slots available.

If I can’t get groceries, it’s not the end of the world for me, since I can call on family if necessary, but I’d rather not make their stressful life any worse right now, since I’m not the only one in my family’s circle that needs help.

There are no great answers, since I might have taken a slot from someone that can’t write a web tool to scrape Amazon, and doesn’t have a family to fall back on. It sucks on many levels.

Amazon Fresh (until a few days ago) was releasing slots 3 days out each night at midnight, so I've been saying up to place orders. Now it seems incremental throughout the day, but I've gotten lucky and nicked a spot. However, they don't have everything I need even normally. Now, it's even worse, so I have to order from multiple places. The local Mart's that deliver are still opening their slots at midnight, though usually for 8 days out, and again items ordered often go out of stock before delivery. It feels like a sureal video game.

>> everybody stays at home and especially avoids crowded indoor places like supermarkets.

I know I shouldn't do that, my doctor has advised me against it, but I have a headache today and this made it worse and I can't help myself so: this is an oxymoron. If everybody is staying at home, then supermarkets cannot be crowded. If supermarkets are crowded, then everybody is not staying at home. Both things can't be happening at once.

Shameless but very relevant plug: Monitoring a website for changes and sending data somewhere else is exactly what we do at https://monitoro.xyz

It’s the difference between maintaining a bunch of scripts and making sure they don’t stop working abruptly, and having the data you wanted without headaches.

It also wouldn’t make for such an elaborate article, but that’s the cost of simplicity if you just want to get things done.

We recently ran into this problem at Cooklist in the US. We ended up setting up the ability for our users to place orders up to 3 days out.

Our system then books their pickup order at midnight when the new pickup slots are opened. We are seeing that most pickup slots are filled for the next day by 9am.

It is interesting that the stores don't allow booking several days in advance anymore. It makes sense though because even with booking for the next day we are seeing that 25% to 50% of the order is substituted due to out of stocks.

I've done the same thing in The Netherlands, as I'm doing the shopping for my grandparents. I noticed that I don't need it yet, but I did see that I might need it in the future since I need to stay awake until 23:59 at night, so I can snatch a slot at 00:00 at the most famous supermarket here.

My script isn't fully ready, but it's 75% complete and I'll complete the final 25% when I really do need it.

Also, these things are quite easy to make, so I expect a lot of techies to eventually do this.

Few months ago someone had posted open source scraper that got 1k+ votes (or maybe not) - it was used by NYTimes for realtime alerts.

Someone remind me please.

Tips: the first session cookie is probably returned if you do a GET on the homepage of the website, so you can simplify your script by

Declaring the requests session, doing get on the homepage and then doing get on the endpoint

It will also prevent issue with session expiration

I’ve done a few of those scrapers and mail to notify projects in the past, but I’ve recently switched from using email to a telegram bot, it’s pretty great. Very easy to implement and doesn’t spam your inbox.

I must say, from the title I was expecting to be disappointed - but this is a very nice and clear example of a useful little hack combining python requests module and a little web page introspection.

I think maybe I'd have gone down to every 5 minutes, to be a little nicer to the end-point (especially when sharing the code) - otoh once a minute isn't to much of a hammer, I guess.

I had a similar idea on Saturday and wrote a puppeteer based script which monitors Tesco.com and then pushes a screenshot to my phone if it finds a slot: https://github.com/paulmaunders/delivery-slot-bot

The supermarket is a post WWII invention. Labour was expensive, so why not have the customer walk around and pick. Typically before WWII shop clerks handed items to waiting customers across the counter.

As any invention it can be reinvented.

Organic farmers started doing deliveries 20 years ago, to compete with the big warehouse boxes.

Would be simpler to just plan four days in advance. Shopping used to be done once a week, or even once a month for bulk and frozen goods. Now it seems to a be what people do instead of going for a walk in the countryside. Makes even less sense now that you don't have to leave your bed to do it.

Greasemonkey seems a much better weapon.

The picture with his cookies contains the suspicious keys "hphone" and "hmail", which likely show md5 sums of his phone number and mail respectively.

Especially the phone one can easily be brute-forced (small search space). I wonder why they hash this in the first place?

I hope they're salted...

Everyone should be ordering online regardless of age or increased risk. Limiting contact with individuals is the only way to stop the spread of this disease. The answer is that the surge in demand for delivery should quickly be filled on the supply side by delivery companies. The increase in business should go to providing hazard pay, PPE, and benefits for the supplying workers. This limits the number of people in contact with others while supplying jobs for those who have been unemployed during this time while increasing pay and benefits for those workers due to their increased risk vs reward. This is how capitalism is supposed to work in theory at least, to quickly adjust to market needs.

I literally build the same thing here in the UK. I knew I couldn't have been the only one lol.

Good job.

The best part of "blood in the streets" is old school hacker news posts like this. Kpi of creative progress to come!

next, booking your grocery pickup as a service /s

The primary mode of transmission is through droplets from coughing and sneezing. Minimizing the amount of time you spend around other people is by far the most effective way to avoid getting the virus. If you put away the delivered items, wash your hands, and then don't return to the kitchen for a few hours, then it doesn't matter if the delivery person infected your items. The virus can't last all that long outside the human body.

However, from a public health perspective you should only use delivery services if you're in an at-risk group. Otherwise you're just transferring your risk onto another person and also doubling the number of people who could be infected by this trip to the store (assuming you live alone).

> I’d rather be the one to lay hands on all my own products.

Someone had to stock the shelves that morning.

I've been keeping my groceries in the bag, sticking the entire thing in the refrigerator, and then not touching it for at least 24 hours.

The only thing delivery/curbside pickup changes is reducing the time spent breathing in close proximity to other people.

How do you trust the employee who restocked the shelves with all the groceries or filled the stands with fruits?

> Why is grocery delivery considered a ‘safer’ option than going to the store yourself.

If we both go to the store, you can infect me and the people working in the store. If the store delivers to you, it is easier to make sure you (the customer) do not infect anyone (they can leave the goods outside, no need for close interaction).

As others mentioned, a lot of people will interact with the goods before you - but it is much more feasible for a store to train and equip a handful of people to take precautions, than to expect the public at large to do so - just a simple thing like not being able to change in a proper wardrobe before entering the store, means customers are a lot more "dangerous" than staff.

>Why would you trust an unknown group of people to take all the proper precautions? Who picked the item by hand? Who is this bringing it to your door? Are you sure they washed hands? Did they accidentally sneeze on anything? Is the vehicle sanitary?

All of these risks are already present from the stockers and checkout at the grocery store, which is why you should wash/cook everything they touch. Even if most of your items are contaminated, you can still keep yourself safe.

>I can keep as much distance from people as I want.

They can also get as close to you as they want, and one unlucky interaction can make you sick. Limiting your contact to one driver who will do what you say is safer.

>I’d rather be the one to lay hands on all my own products.

I've seen this, and similar, opinions about grocery stores that just illustrates how detached the public is from modern food supply chains.

Do you have any idea how many hands touch your food before it gets on your plate? From the fields (where works probably urinate while on the job) to the shelves, it passes through probably 10s if not 100s of hands.

All good points, but these cautions apply before you encounter and touch your purchases as well. In either case, you're cleaning and disinfecting your potentially contaminated purchases inside your home, whether or not someone touched them before or after you purchased them.

I don't think you're eliminating a vector by going out yourself. Not significantly, if at all.

We just sanitize everything that comes into the house. Anything in a package gets wiped down with Clorox wipes d anything else gets washed with soapy water. Bags to into the garbage the kitchen gets Wiped down with Clorox wipes once it’s all put away. It slows things down but it’s the only safe way I can think of to make sure you aren’t bringing anything home from the store. That goes for delivery or self shopping; you have no idea who or how many people touched the products you bought and are bringing home, so better be safe then leave it up to guess work.

38% of the people hospitalized with COVID-19 are between 20 and 54. [1] Everyone can catch the illness, everyone can wind up in the hospital, and depending on the state of the local hospitals, everyone is in immediate danger.

[1] https://www.msn.com/en-ca/health/medical/close-to-40percent-...

How not-young must one be to be legitimate in taking steps like this to avoid contracting this potentially fatal illness?

I’m not yet 40. I have bought all of my food online and had it delivered for years now. Should I now begin exposing myself to the infection risks posed by going inside a grocery store?

This may sound like snark but it’s not. I’m curious about the opinions of people who feel this way.

To add to this, if the sick can’t get grocery delivery, they will go to the grocery stores.

In Bulgaria between 8.30 and 10.30 shops are open for the elderly only. I'm not sure how effective this is but it strikes me as a good low tech move.

Actually, it depends on where do you live. In OP's country elder people have been given rights to call social services and even police to get their shopping done. Other than that, in Turkey family relations are similar to Italy: the old people and younglings usually live together. So there is always a risk to get the disease in the market and then pass it to an elder back at home. OP's doing the right thing keeping his head down and order online.

Whilst I may be young and relatively healthy (mild asthma) I'm still sticking to delivery. Near to me there are few grocery stores and if I wanted to go to a larger store I would typically take transit. I've tried to minimise my impact by only ordering every 2 weeks as opposed to every week, but it seems like this is how I can have the lowest impact given the situation.

Not giving you it to young people prevents them from giving it to vulnerable people further down the road.

If 1 person infects 10 prevention of one transmission can save a 1000.

Everyone ought to do curbside pick up or delivery for everything.

At this point everyone is in immediate danger of catching the virus, the ill and the elderly are just the ones less likely to recover from it.

Probably the fairest way to do it is everyone gets in the queue instead of competing for spots, and limits are enforced to help spread demand.

I agree; however, a plea to young people on HN is much less effective than having it as a company policy. They could reserve some/most/all spots for seniors.

Web queues are ineffective as shown by sneaker bots. You’d need actual ID style authentication of accounts. If you’re talking about order queues than people will stuff the queue and cancel their orders or just have more hoarding if their multiple deliveries get processed. If it’s FIFO same technical advantages will apply: bots can click much faster than humans ever will. I think the issue is more human nature and things moving to the web creating inequality between the technically adept and non-adept.

It seems to me that that they already have a 4-day-long queue, and the error message is in fact a "the queue is full" error.

Why not a longer queue? I don't know, but I'd guess people forget about their order and buy redundant things, causing support and customer satisfaction problems, if the queue is longer than 4 days.

Ocado in the UK has been having queues to get onto the site and limiting people to one slot per week. They are now giving people who have been paying for delivery passes before 2020 priority access to the site one day per week (divided randomly into 7 groups) to book slots. I presume they are also doing something similar for vulnerable customers. I have wondered whether if it'd be possible to hack the queuing process somehow but imagine the number of people capable of doing that would be tiny and am too honest to consider myself! I'm more wrangling with whether it is ethical to take a slot at all (but we are getting allergen-free stuff for another family and don't want to let them down).

Ocado in the UK do exactly this, using queue-it [0].

On some sites, apparently queue-jumping is as simple as disabling javascript (n.b. Ocado [1] have been in the game longer than most, and this does not work on their site).

[0] https://queue-it.com/ [1] https://ocado.queue-it.net/

Some websites do put you in a queue to get to the actual website/shopping. You don't even get to access the website until it's your turn. Like waiting in front of a shop.

Not a great experience if you want to just access your account, or some general information on the website, like contact info, or delivery times.

It is a good idea. And may be telling the waiting list number or queue number will help. Because otherwise the buyer has to every-time visit the page. User acknowledgement through queue token or waitlisting number will help.