Here in the Houston areas, supermarkets like Kroger/Walmart/HEB/etc always have single floor buildings. Why can't they build multi-floor buildings for storage upstairs and retail walk-in sales on the ground floor? On the above ground floors, they can create an automated or semi-automated system for employees to gather up items for online/delivery orders.
Probably because you then need pillars throughout the entire building to support the second floor which you are loading down with a ton of weight. The average forklift weighs 3x or more the weight of the average car, and then adding racking and stock on top of that. Yeah if you completely redesign your storage system to not require forklifts you save weight there, but you end up adding the weight back with all the heavy duty track systems and extra heavy duty racks that are required to eliminate the forklifts. Plus there is liability of having that weight up top, a rack failure on a second floor could take down half the building.
It is possible, but you end up spending 10x as much on the building.
The difference is the 100x the cost to build it and the completely different amounts of foot traffic and margins available in dense city centers. Nobody is going to build such a store if their return on investment is expected 50-100 years down the road.
I think this is correct. A lot of these buildings seem to be post frame or poll barn style. Relatively cheap for building large square footage buildings but add some limitations to multiple floors. Even if you put the storage floor under the shopping floor you'll run into tons of issues with buildings of these sizes that don't have a ton of pillars for additional support. I mostly see these stores built on vacant "rural" land on the outskirts of cities rather than in city centers themselves. Which means the single floor square footage is rarely an issue and not something worth designing a building around. If you have all the space you need to go wide, it's almost never worth going tall.
Good construction is not cheap and takes many quarters. Land outside the urban area is far too cheap and probably subsidized (directly or with free oversized infrastructure) because local government always wants jobs, even small numbers of shitty jobs.
Glad someone made this point. I'm curious how long people think most items in a grocery store last? Just consider the trucks you see stocking them on a daily basis. Typically it is bread and other high flow consumables, no?
Retail stores are logistics. And part of that is product flow. There are trucks coming in every single day. When you buy an item at a store, that item is deducted from the store's inventory, when that item's stock reaches a certain threshold, an order is immediately placed to the distribution center, and that item is loaded onto a truck and could arrive as soon as that night.
There's no reason to keep anything "in the back" except for high demand items that aren't brought in by a vendor and overflow from items that didn't quite fill a shelf.
The store is the warehouse and the store owner is allowing self service inside the warehouse but not at checkout.
Having robots means you're automating something that your customers would have done for free. The automation is an additional expense and does not reduce your operating costs.
The online grocery business model only works for two types of customers: those who are willing to pay a premium for convenience and those who need some specialty products that local grocers don't sell.
The first market is a competitor to doordash, this either means automating the in-store pickup or the delivery itself.
The second market is actually a drag on your local grocery stores. You don't want to carry niche products that are only interesting to a tiny portion of your market e.g. products for rare food intolerances, groceries for expats. If you want to carry them in your store, you'd want the customer to preorder them themselves, so you know exactly how much you need and then make them pick them up.
Basically the correct business model is in-house doordash (or B2B doordash) combined with preorders.
> Having robots means you're automating something that your customers would have done for free. The automation is an additional expense and does not reduce your operating costs.
Ultimately, I was pointing out why a two story grocery store with a "warehouse" on top doesn't make sense. A place to put stuff is not the issue for retail.
But, what you wrote there is a fair way to look at the core issue for Kroger.
Right, I just meant that you have a high chance of seeing the bread and drinks/chips getting delivered. They turn over pretty much daily. I would imagine it is the condiments and other very long shelf stable things that you may not see getting restocked on a daily basis?
Bread/snack cakes (Little Debbie, the bakery also does bread), chips, soda, and liquor/beer are typically handled by vendors. Coca-Cola has a guy come out and stock the Coca-Cola products. Frito-Lay has a guy handle the Frito-Lay products. Etc. They don't work for the store in any capacity.
Vendors typically come during the normal operating hours of the store. Bread guys like to be early in the morning. Chip and soda guys have routes and they'll get to you depending on how the rest of their route goes.
As for other stock, for the grocery side, the distribution center usually palletize stock based on aisle. And the pallets come shrinkwrapped on a truck that arrives at the store between 8 and 10. Someone from the store unloads the pallets from the truck into the warehouse. Once the truck is unloaded, they head back to the distribution center. At the store, the pallets are then staged near their respective aisles and workers restock the shelves overnight.
On the general goods side, the stock is loose in the truck, and a team of people unload the truck and palletize it based on department. Then those pallets are staged in the department for stocking by the overnight crew.
Source: my first job was with WalMart. I worked day stock in a few departments on both the grocery and general goods sides. I worked unloading the trucks on the general goods side. I also worked overnight on the general goods side. I've been involved with a good portion of the store side of the restocking. So all of this information is at least 20 years old, some things may have changed. But I've seen the vendors still while I'm shopping, so the broad strokes likelys till apply.
To rephrase what I think you are saying, I'm more likely to notice these trucks because they will be specifically branded by the vendors? That makes sense.
I assumed it was that and that they are there basically every day. Always notable on the days when a snow storm is announced and bread will be completely wiped out. Only to be fully stocked the next day.
I thought about this a lot with parking spaces, nobody like big, open, tree-less parking lots. Why not just build them up adjacent to the grocery store.
The answer is $. It costs too much and land is cheaper than building up (In most places).
All recent HEBs have dedicated grocery pickup staging space. I chatted with a staffer once. It is like its own little grocery store where they keep selections of hot, cold and room temperature bags of selected groceries temperature controlled until the orderer comes and they put them together and bring them out.
The ones in Bellaire and Meyerland are two level with parking (aka flooding space) below the store and a smaller parking lot on the second level with the store. Bellaire also has a fancy fuel cell setup for some reason. The single level HEB in Montrose(ish) was built into the site of an old complex of charming but nearly abandoned standalone quad/duplexes with many mature oaks. They seem to have retained nearly all of the trees on the grounds in greenspaces within the parking lot and entryway.
Here's some street view of Montrose. They also had a bike air and repair system when it opened. I'm not certain if it stayed in good repair itself. https://maps.app.goo.gl/KxHAvDqKca4E8L8a7
Have you tried "uBlock Origin Lite"? It is by the same author, Raymond Hill (gorhill). It has been working fine. I use "optimal" level for the filtering mode. (Note: I use Chromium on Linux)
"The Firefox version of uBO Lite will cease to exist, I am dropping support because of the added burden of dealing with AMO nonsensical and hostile review process. "
There is no need to use uBOL on Firefox, just use the normal version.
EDIT: But yeah, the Mozilla reviewers are very hostile, also had to fight with them for one of my add-ons. It's ridiculous that spam and malware add-ons get a pass but privacy-conscious add-ons get rejected.
Not everything is a conspiracy theory. Mozilla's reviewers were already infamous in the XUL era. Mozilla's dumbness is not due to Google it's due to them themselves.
One would think properly reviewing one of the most important addons in Firefox would warrant spending sufficient resources, which Mozilla seems to have for less impactful stuff.
Do you still live on a farm on in a city? Here in the suburbs, something is making animals "less smart". Every neighborhood has signs about missing pets. I suspect it also affects people too. Why get a pet when everyone is too busy to take care of it?
Missing pets are because people don't spend enough time with their animals to form a pack attachment (for dogs) and cats just don't give a shit.
Or. . . The encroachment of suburbs in currently rural areas means coyotes and pets come in contact. . .
Also I still live on the farm. And animals here can be dumb as hell as well. Our neighbors miniature donkey regularly escapes, just to get his head stuck in the fence trying to get to his food trough from the outside.
I'm in Austria. There are price aggregator sites likes Geizhals and Idealo that helps you find deals across many stores. More often I just go to a store I know and like. It happens I pay a little more, but not having 15 cheap options with one off brand names is actually more a pro than a con..
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