Did you see where Amazon, the
fourth most valuable company in the world, bought Whole Foods? This has
the trillion dollar grocery industry all atwitter and even has Wal Mart
shakin' in its shorts. So much so that it came up with the idea of
delivering the groceries you order online right to your refrigerator.
This is the kind of idea that gets hatched in long meetings around big
tables by dudes in low shoes whose phones are smarter than they are.
Wal Mart says the groceries will be
delivered by a company called Deliv but I'd worry about any company that
can't even spell Deliver. Supposedly the drivers will have a one-time
access code into your home to stock your shelves and you can watch the
delivery on your phone from anywhere on the globe. I assume that would
include watching your housepest take a bio break.
Personally, I don't like the concept
because going grocery shopping is the only time I take my wife anywhere
and it would mean I'd never get to read the checkout literature. I don't
think Wal Mart has thought this idea through or how it might work out
in the great spaces in between places. For example…
A ranch woman places her order on
WalMart.com because she had to bale hay all day and didn't have time to
shop. Later that day out where the hard road ends, there are no numbered
streets, and the voice on the GPS goes silent, the male Deliv driver
gets lost and being male, he refuses to stop to ask directions. It
didn't really matter because there was no sign of anyone anyway. You
can't really blame the driver for getting lost because all the screen on
his phone said to do was, "turn left at the mail box that looks like it
went three rounds with a baseball bat."
He finally turned down a dirt corduroy
road that looked promising but after a half mile all the groceries were
covered in dust, the milk had jiggled into butter and the HoHos,
chocolate chip ice cream, and Twinkies had congealed into big blobs of
sugar. It took the driver 30 minutes to unlock the secret to opening the
first of several tight barbed wire gates and his grocery apron hardly
provided adequate protection. With dripping blood oozing from pricks all
over his arms he looked like he'd been attacked by a paper shredder.
Then the Deliv driver was chased back into his van by what he later
described to his boss as, "a grotesque monster that must have weighed
ten tons." Actually, she was just a pet mare looking for a carrot or an
apple.
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