I do technical consulting for the grocery business. The grocery industry is a lot of fun -- lots of extremely hard technical challenges and interesting CS problems, but also lots of low hanging fruit in the way of painful manual process. Couple this with the fact that the grocery marketplace is dynamic in the extreme. Prices and availability of items in categories like produce change on a daily if not hourly cadence. And it's <i>all</i> about relationships, which is something nearly every startup in this space misses, which is why nearly all of them fail faster and harder than they do in other industries. You won't get far if you're thinking in terms of replacing people with APIs.<p>Anyway, I'm excited to see what the next ten years will bring here.
Where are they getting "petabytes" of daily data from? Even if you took every single transaction anywhere near the industry, in all its details, and represented it in a verbose format like JSON or XML, that's still only kilobytes of data times billions of transactions = terabytes.<p>If they were gathering tons of video, maybe. Or vast numbers of high-precision sensors generating data continuously. But I didn't see anything like that.<p>It's just hard for any human activity to generate that much data. Is "petabytes" just some kind of hype, or is there something I'm missing?
This is a elegant writeup that explains how instacart works with detail that I feel like I've never seen from other companies that face similar challenges (uber, doordash). Thank you to the authors!
I don’t understand the purpose of the Item Availability Model. If you’re getting inventory updates from a store at least once a day, can’t you use a more simple approach to stock prediction than a machine learning model? I.e. they can calculate the historic sale velocity of an item and with the current stock number decide whether the item will be there when the shopper arrives? They give the example of seasonal items, but if a customer tried to order egg nog in July, wouldn’t they have inventory data that the nog hasn’t been in stock for months? Maybe I’m overestimating the fidelity or completeness of the data they receive from retailers, and I guess ML is a way to do all this math without expressing it in code.
In the same way that I find Mealpal infinitely more satisfying than any food delivery, I am over the moon about shopping for groceries online and picking them up in person.<p>The interaction with the business I am paying is valuable to me. I can - and do - give direct feedback about the service, which improves it.<p>And if I forgot something, I can also run into the store and grab it, COVID circumstances permitting.<p>The _same guy_ puts groceries in my car every time. A guy with a job that has health insurance. That matters.
I stopped using Instacart when they were unable to deliver an order in the time windows I selected and then unilaterally changed the time to a time when I was not going to be at home. I complained and they insisted and eventually the food was left outside for hours until it went bad.<p>A shortsighted decision on their part. Because right after they took that stupid decision I stopped using their services forever and have told everyone I know to do the same.<p>Plus, sometimes you want to buy one thing and add extra stuff to your cart in order to meet the minimum order value, and they do not have the one thing you were interested in on stock and you end up wasting your time.<p>Amazon is much better at estimating stock and much more reliable. Amazon customer support is better and prioritizes long term relationships with customers over short term revenue.
Neat content but the “secret sauce” is really the willingness/ability to take advantages of the employees they call contractors. Throughout human history exploiting people has been one of the most effective business models imaginable and yet somehow Instacart (and others) have figured out a way to lose absolutely astounding amounts of money doing it.
Let's talk about the hard problem here. Control and Flexibility. I'm a regular Instacart user and I don't think I've ever had a perfect order. There's always something wrong in terms of size, quality, or availability. Most of the time it's no big deal but it begs the question, can these problems be eliminated?<p>Take the perspective of a 3 star chef. You've got two major strategies to work with 1. Control and 2. Flexibility.<p>The control strategy means you have deep trust in reliable suppliers. You've spent years finding the people who can get you what you need when you need it. You build your menu in consultation with your suppliers and then you check, check, and recheck every single order to make sure the standard doesn't slip. It's incredibly hard.<p>The flexible strategy means that you adapt your menu daily or nearly daily to the supply you select yourself. Your talent is taking what is available, finding the best, and creating surprise and delight in a clientele who like that kind of thing. This is also incredibly hard.<p>Basically nowhere in the high-quality-fresh-food world can you 100% rely on supply. And that's the challenge that Instacart faces. It doesn't have any strong relationships with suppliers (it's all third party or arms-reach) and it has almost no ability to be flexible because the orders are set by people who are hard to reach and haven't explained their needs.<p>There's <i>some</i> light in this tunnel. For example plantoeat.com (recipe and meal planning service) now integrates with instacart, but it doesn't work well at all. Even when it does populate the cart shoppers don't know the recipe associated with what they are buying and aren't incentivized to care.<p>Throwing layers of ML on top of unpredictable systems isn't a terrible idea, but it's a bandaid. The problems as I've described above are 1. Lack of control and 2. An inability to be flexible because you don't understand the needs you're fulfilling.<p>The best answer to this is vertical integration. Goodeggs.com is one vertically integrated grocery delivery service. You could also think of it as a net-first grocery store, ghost grocer, whatever. When I buy from them I'm <i>much</i> more likely to get what I ask for. And in the cases where I am ordering a meal kit and they are out of some component, they know what can and cannot be substituted to fulfill the requirements of the recipe.<p>I don't think Instacart is going anywhere, it does what it does pretty well and I think it will keep getting better. But Amazon was right to buy Whole Foods and until Instacart owns the entirety of the production and distribution chain they won't get to the kind of experience people have been used to when they plan a meal, visit a store, and select for themselves.
Algorithms aside, I just found out that one of the victims in the Colorado shooting was an Instacart shopper.<p>It hit me real hard thinking that the app user who made the Instacart order never knew why their order was late and may have even gotten upset and asked for a refund, not having the slightest idea about the tragedy that happened behind the scenes, or the risk to their own life had they gone shopping themselves that day instead of ordering online.<p>"The mother of two was at the supermarket filling an Instacart order, something she did in retirement to help others, he told the newspaper."<p><a href="https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2021/03/23/boulder-shooting-victims-colorado-identified-eric-talley/6964265002/" rel="nofollow">https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2021/03/23/boulde...</a>