If I were setting this up for a grocery delivery platform, I would require the delivery address be provided upfront to enter the queue. Validate and standardize the address using the official Postal Service API (in the US). Prohibit changing the delivery address once in the queue, and prohibit the same address from appearing in the queue multiple times. Those requirements eliminate the mechanical possibility and incentive to partake in any sort of hoarding or profiteering using bots.
I guess the idea is to put everyone in one queue, rather than having separate queues per day/slot. Presumably this isn't an issue since everyone's on lockdown anyways, so they're always available to accept a delivery.
And now you've just excluded all the doctors, nurses, police officers, firefighters, and their families from using the service.
Supermarkets don’t have that problem - their goods are not that exclusive and not sought after at scale (anyone wanting to resell the products at scale can get them cheaper from the manufacturer directly).
You can say that about literally anything. The value of anything goes up if it's liquid.
It just means the price paid or received is closer to the consensus valuation.
This should negate any technical advantage from a sophisticated entity. Queues still work, if managed properly.
How does this deal with bots that places orders on other people's behalf?
But I think you wouldn't need it with upfront payment and some simple anti-hoarding rules.
Also the delivery address or payment id could be used in a way to make this fair.
Some companies have databases that know the layouts in each address but many do not.
...and that's rendered ineffective by SaaS bot companies that take your account logins and payment details and places the orders on your behalf, for a fee of course[1]. The economically efficient solution would be to auction off the slots, so at least the grocer is reaping the profit rather than some third party. It also has the benefit of capitalizing the grocer so they can hire more people and/or buy more equipment so there are more slots in total. Also, if it bothers you that some FAANG programmer can afford deliveries than some old granny, this can be alleviated by reserving a certain % of the slots to "needy" people (eg. old, disabled, sick, immunocompromised) subject to validation.
[1] kinda like https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Domain_drop_catching
That's not what I'm saying. Rather than buying a slot (or an account) from the bot operator, you'd give the bot operator your order and address/account/payment info, so when the slots become available, the bot operator can place an order on your behalf.
They need an option for people who are flexible with their delivery times, put in your order and they assign you a delivery slot when one opens up.
If a bot can do that, then amazon can just do it themselves and actually improve the user's experience.
How many people are working from home right now that don't can _when_ groceries get delivered other than "the next available slot"
A food delivery auction would in some segments drive up the cost drastically when some can least afford it fuelling panic. This panic would fuel buying and hoarding.
Meanwhile the poor flock to the shelves to buy before the rich can pay to have it all delivered for hoarding.
Surge pricing for groceries during a crisis may be one of the worse ideas I've seen on hacker news.
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.
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).
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.