Open Source ERP system for Makerspaces and Community shared system.
Started out as a kanban style of system where anyone could request that we re-order cleaning supplies at a Makerspace. Has evolved to tagging assets and maintaining those assets and I'm working on adding ESP32 based device control to enable/disable devices through those QR codes.
I've always said that in the back of my mind, the most successful grocery store would be the 'walls' of the store -- bakery, deli, produce, meats, floral, cheeses, dairy and having a little selection of store brands in the middle where consumers can pick up (and vendors can pay a premium for endcap space, because they're the only non-branded products out there), with the rest of the SKU's behind the walls of the grocery store in a fulfillment only model.
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.
So what grocery stores used to be ~90 years ago, when the norm was you would give the clerk a list and they would grab your items from the back? The only stores I'm still aware of that are setup like this are auto parts stores, where 90% of the inventory is in the back.
Toolstation still has a model like that, and I gotta say I love it. They also seem to hire people who actually know something about the products they sell which is an unfortunate rarity these days.
Professional supply houses are usually that way, too.
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.
The instant I read the first sentence of your comment, I thought "McMaster-Carr but for food" might be the most appealing pitch for online grocery delivery I've ever heard.
...with the caveat that McMaster's facilities are staffed by people, not robots.
Amusingly, the Kroger near me is almost that way already.
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...
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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.
Our Kroger has the same service, we use it a lot. Grocery stores are annoying to me, and Kroger feels almost intentionally designed to piss me off, so that's why we use the pickup order thing. Beware:
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. :) )
One difference is that the Domino's employee's job is to make your pizza. None of their other duties are exactly rocket science. I ran a pizza place, I'd know. Meanwhile, preparing your grocery order is maybe the third priority on any given Kroger employee's list, behind running a register, stocking shelves, inventory, cleaning, tending to Kroger's spastic self-checkout machines, ...
I guess I prefer my groceries to be ready at a predictable time, rather than sitting around waiting between 1 and N hours. No experience I've ever had with food delivery in the age of DoorDash has made me think "yeah, I want more of this experience in my life."
My nephew works for Kroger, primarily picking stock for online orders.
He's a good dude and I enjoy hanging out with him, but I absolutely promise you that he doesn't do all of those jobs. He doesn't do anything quickly-enough to shift roles like that, and never has. To use a polite managerial description: He definitely works at his own pace.
I don't see that kind of task diversity at the store I usually shop at, either.
The register people do register stuff. The self-checkout people do self-checkout stuff. The order-pickers do order-picking. The people who bag groceries and fetch carts just bag groceries and fetch carts. The produce folks do produce. The florists florist. And so forth.
Sometimes I see a management-type range-walking from one problem to the next, but even that's exceptional.
It's the only real grocery store we have in the small city in which I live, so I get to spend a fair bit of time there whether I like it or not. I've spent years passively becoming familiar with the people who work there, and the jobs they do.
If they moved around much between different roles, I'd have noticed it by now.
(It's also a union shop, which may have something to do with it. When high-speed shifts from pushing a broom and heads out to the parking lot to fetch carts before he starts sorting produce, he's taking work away from the people who normally do those jobs and diminishing their roles. Unions may tend to dislike that kind of thing.
We didn't shift around much when I worked in union retail, either. It was a big deal for me to spend a day away from my department to help out with another one that was short-handed, and an opportunity was always presented for me to say "No, I'll just keep working where I normally work."
It was an even bigger deal if they needed help over on the grocery side of the store, which had a completely different union with a completely different contract. The union guys had to agree to allow it every time before that could happen.)
In the UK you have a whole chain of stores called Argos where you have a catalogue of items, you pick the items you want and the clerk brings them to you. Also Screwfix and Toolstation are both hardware stores that operate the same way.
This reminds me of the retail chain Service Merchandise which apparently used to operate this way. You'd walk around the store looking at display products, pick things out on a sheet, and then they'd appear on a conveyor belt.
that is a guarantee for less sales, not sure it makes business sense.
for example, i don't buy generic products, i want specific properties from them. and sometimes i don't know what i want, i look at the isle and only then decide. and let's not forget about impulse shopping.
honestly, i wouldn't shop at this store, i want to get the items myself, without any interaction. interactions add delays.
This gave me a flashback to Service Merchandise. No idea how widespread they were, but that's how it operated. You'd collect tags for the things you want, take them to the counter, wait a bit and your order would roll out on a belt. Pull your car up, load it and leave.
I ran a large cloud environment for two different US based retailers.
Grocer A: They built their cloud strategy with Azure in mind. Microsoft partnered up with them early on at the C-Level and grocer was given a metric fuck-ton of free services to help build and identify the proper cloud strategy for all of their 2500-ish stores.
Luxury Goods Retailer B: Moved from a Data Center to AWS, since that's where our corporate IT partner recommended we go to. C-level leadership tried to get some fake products removed from Amazon.com, Amazon.com said no, we were given the green light to spend "...whatever needed to be spent" to get us off of AWS and over to Google Cloud as quickly as possible.
It's been my experience that the Google Cloud sales reps will always usually reach out after money raising announcements and other acquisition events just to let you know that they're there and please spend money with them. It was never "Don't fund your competitor," it was always, "we're google, our tech works, they're not going to sunset google cloud, our support sucks, use our partner."
Just about every web server these days supports ACME -- some natively, some via scripts, and you can set up your own internal CA using something like step-ca that speaks ACME if you don't want your certs going out to the transparency log.
The last few companies I've worked at had no http behind the scenes -- everything, including service-to-service communications was handled via https. It's a hard requirement for just about everything financial, healthcare, and sensitive these days.
[proceeds to describe a bunch of new infrastructure and automation you need to setup and monitor]
So when ACME breaks - which it will, because it's not foolproof - the server securely hosting the cafeteria menus is now inaccessible, instead of being susceptible to interception or modification in transit. Because the guy that has owned your core switches is most concerned that everyone will be eating taco salad every day.
Percepta was a company that was doing a lot of CV/ML in this space looking for shoplifting traits. They had a few paying customers before they were completely acquired by ADT Business. A lot of shoplifters use the PLU for bananas when tag swapping higher-ticket items at the self checkout, so, more than likely, they wanted to check that you were actually purchasing bananas.
The scan as you shop thing seems to be pretty heavily audited, which really removes the point of doing it, since it just slowed things down. I think when I tried it I put up with it for about 4 out of the first 6 shops winding up slower than just going through the self-checkout or a regular one because of the extra faff.
I regularly do scan as you shop and have started to notice some patterns in auditing. If I change my mind on a product and remove it from the basket while shopping I'll get audited almost every time, similarly if I add a single onion (which is a weighed product) to my basket. I do enjoy the company line of asking "did you have trouble scanning anything" just before they do the check, which is blatantly a get out of jail free card to say "oh, yes, I did in fact have some trouble scanning that 42" TV that doesn't appear in the basket currently".
In France at the Monoprix chain, I'm randomly audited about once a month.
Which is doubly annoying, because I'm in that line to save time, and now I have to hunt down one of the employees who isn't paying attention or where they're supposed to be.
I regularly get flagged for review during self checkout at my local market. It occurred to me the other day that when a cashier handles the scanning, I don’t take on any risk. Now I have to do the checkout work myself, and if I do it poorly, I can go to prison. Welcome to the future!
In NL AH for me it seems to come in waves. For a while I'll be checked every other time, and then not at all for some time. This could just be me seeing patterns where they aren't though, perhaps I should track it for curiosity.
You can just refuse that BS in non-membership stores. After payment, your debts are settled and the merchandise is your property. If they want oversight they need to eliminate self-checkout and staff their registers.
That's not true in most the USA. Shopkeepers privilege allows them to confine you and/or the goods, which depending on state only requires something akin to "reasonably believed you were stealing." In my state a shopkeep can confine me until police arrive on pretty flimsy evidence, which if in the country could be a very long time. It is better just to find stores that don't do it and shop there - - I stopped shopping at walmart after I was confronted by gigantic bouncers accusing me of stealing (yes in the hood Walmart is very aggressive with shopkeepers privilege, if you live in wealthy area and refuse they much more likely to just let you go).
You could try to stop them but if they are hurt in the process it could very well end in a lengthy trip to prison.
I've eliminated Chrome from my personal systems when uBO stopped working. Blocking v2 manifests also broke a few extensions that were being developed for my day job: they've spent the last few weeks working on Firefox extensions and are almost at the point where they're getting ready to wipe Chrome from our corporate machines.
My optometrist told me that I have a tendency to 'overcompensate' the last time I had my rx checked; I now tell the optometrists that I have a tendency to overcompensate and ask that they dilate my eyes before anything starts and it's really helped me reduce eye strain.
Same here: it's called "accommodative excess". And in particular, it won't show up on a vision test.
I always got 20/20 on my vision tests, but kept complaining to different optometrists, and finally found one smart enough to recognize my situation, and now I wear -0.5 lenses. It brought my life out of a very dark place.
In the 90's my grandma had her knee replaced. She was bed-bound for 2 weeks before they'd start physical therapy to get her knees back in order. (Ironically enough, her first knee was recalled...so she had a total of three knee surgeries Left, Right, then Left again) over a span of 11 years.
In 2018, my mom had her left knee and right knee done at the same time...and they had her up walking the halls of the floor the next day and was back at home less than 72 hours after her surgery, and she's walking just fine these days without any assistance.
Started out as a kanban style of system where anyone could request that we re-order cleaning supplies at a Makerspace. Has evolved to tagging assets and maintaining those assets and I'm working on adding ESP32 based device control to enable/disable devices through those QR codes.
https://github.com/uid0/openmakersuite