![]() Thailand’s coconut-picking industry is fueled by the labor of endangered pig-tailed macaques-many of whom were illegally snatched from their forest homes as babies. Watch the full interview with Amazon’s Landry.Austin, Texas – An unusual gift is on its way to Whole Foods President and CEO Jason Buechel from PETA: an armload of human-picked coconuts along with a letter urging him to ban Thai coconut milk from the company’s stores and supply chain. “It’s not necessarily a model that we’re going to replicate everywhere, but it’s something that we want to learn about, and we want to see what the impact to the business overall is, so it’s something that we’re looking at closely,” Landry said. But she added that the new delivery-warehouse model is too new for Amazon to say whether it will be expanded. When asked about what some customers view as a degraded in-store shopping experience at Whole Foods stores, Landry cited a new Whole Foods delivery-only warehouse in Brooklyn, New York City, as an example of an alternative way the company is trying to fulfill delivery demand. “I like to pick my own produce, but if I have to fight with eight people over a fricking avocado, maybe I should be hiring someone to do it for me,” one Whole Foods shopper told Bloomberg recently. Customers in some stores say they have to compete with Amazon delivery contractors for in-demand items. Walmart last month introduced Walmart+, its own membership program that costs $98 a year and offers grocery delivery as its main perk.įor Amazon, though, the surge in demand - for Whole Foods deliveries specifically - has caused frustration for both Whole Foods customers and store employees. A year ago, Amazon added grocery delivery from Amazon Fresh and Whole Foods to its existing suite of perks available to Prime members without increasing the $119 annual fee. Walmart, Target, and Instacart also recorded huge sales increases on grocery orders. Amazon said online grocery sales tripled in the second quarter of 2020 compared to the same three-month period in 2019. Just about all services faced out-of-stock issues for the most in-demand products, and it was not uncommon for orders to arrive with missing or incorrect items as warehouse and delivery workers dealt with an unprecedented array of operational obstacles and potential health risks.Īnd yet these companies still reported record sales. Landry said Amazon is “kind of expecting” it’ll need to enable the feature in certain parts of the US in the coming months.Īmazon, as well as other online grocery delivery services from Walmart, Instacart, and Target, ran into numerous hurdles early in the pandemic, when governments in many large metropolitan regions issued stay-at-home orders for nonessential workers, causing demand for grocery delivery services to spike dramatically. Amazon also increased delivery capacity by more than 160 percent in the second quarter of this year to help handle the new normal in grocery delivery. Once a shopper signs up, they are given an estimate for when delivery availability will open up and, when it does, the company notifies them and gives them two hours to place their order.Īmazon is currently employing the new tech feature in parts of the United Kingdom, where recent surges in Covid-19 cases have spurred more customer demand for grocery deliveries. The new feature, which will appear in areas only where delivery availability is limited, prompts customers trying to place grocery orders from Amazon Fresh or Whole Foods to reserve a virtual place in line when there is no immediate availability over the next few days. If there’s no delivery availability when a shopper tries to place a grocery order, that customer can now sign up to be notified when a spot opens up. Landry says Amazon has now come up with a solution if there are large spikes in demand this fall and winter, whether because of a jump in Covid-19 cases, a surge in other illnesses (like the flu), or bad weather. “One thing that if I could have a magic wand and do over in the early part of the pandemic, a feature that I wish we had right off the bat, is if we run out of capacity … we want to give customers an equitable and fair way to reserve a place in line,” Stephenie Landry, Amazon’s vice president of grocery (which includes Amazon Prime Now and Amazon Fresh), said Wednesday during an interview for Recode’s Code virtual event series. Some customers were forced to check for availability dozens of times a day, including in the middle of the night, while others resorted to using a computer program to grab a spot in line. ![]() Millions of Americans relied on Amazon grocery delivery earlier this year as the Covid-19 pandemic hit the US, but many had one big complaint: It was often hard, if not impossible, to find an available delivery time slot in many metro regions. ![]()
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