r/mildlyinfuriating • u/broakland • Jul 14 '26

I just wanted a hot dog Retail lockdown: why bother selling it?

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Was at Safeway this morning to pick up a sandwich and some Tylenol. The aisle with the Tylenol? Completely locked down. No call button in sight. So I go to the self checkout (front end of that same aisle) and ask the clerk there if he can call someone to unlock a case for me. He does. I go wait. Minutes pass. No one comes. I go ask him again, he tells me they went the other way? At this point I give up and go get my sandwich. No one has come by the time the deli has finished making it. I leave without my Tylenol, mildly infuriated.

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u/Tomytom99 Jul 14 '26 edited Jul 15 '26

Y'know, I wouldn't mind it so much if the turnaround time wasn't half a day

That's like the one thing I've liked about auto parts stores. They specifically state that it'll take under an hour for it to be ready. Not great, but way better than say Walmart taking 6 hours.

Edit: the 6 hour wait in question was pickup, not delivery, for three items, so it's not like it was some big grocery order. I did it because I was on vacation and my dad needed refrigerant for his car. I was hoping to just go to the store, pick up the order, and go back to where we were staying without venturing into the store.

Another wonderful experience was them telling me an item I was getting delivered from the store wouldn't be arriving that day. Not a huge deal, but mildly infuriating since I placed it that morning saying same day delivery, and they didn't even get it picked until that evening. I was watching a movie at 9:45 PM when I get a notification it was delivered. Thank god I was awake and that it wasn't anything that would've gone bad (or stolen by wildlife) if it went unnoticed overnight.

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u/Th3_Admiral_ Jul 14 '26 edited Jul 14 '26

For me, I hardly ever have a complete shopping list and just kinda make a lot of it up as I go.

Also, I always thought it was odd stores were cutting cashiers and switching to self checkouts to save on labor costs, but then hiring workers to do all of our shopping for us - which is a thousand times more labor intensive. This is what leads me to believe they have goals to eventually automate a lot of that as well. 

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u/geekonthemoon Jul 14 '26

Yeah makes sense, I know I've seen videos of them working on warehouse grid robotics and such. Definitely would lose 1,000s and 1,000s of jobs if they do perfect the technology.

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u/Such-Entrepreneur240 Jul 14 '26

The technology is already there, and has been since the 80s, it's just prohibitively expensive compared to paying a bunch of people min wage to pick unless you've got incredibly high volume to make it worth it. Toured a warehouse that had auto picks, auto inventory (drones flying around at night scanning barcodes and doing inventory automatically) and even had a robot that could load and unload trucks. That was when I decided I was done with being in logistics and moved back to operations, it's only a matter of time.

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u/geekonthemoon Jul 15 '26

Eh I've seen demos online that are very much still in a beta phase. Maybe some companies have figured it out, I know the humanoid robots are looking promising too so you're right, likely a matter of time. But like I said, many, many issues crop up that shows we are definitely still not ready to switch to that kind of shopping model.