It makes sense. Just like "economy" vs "first class" for travel. As a business, it needs to partition out the consumer buckets into various groups for profit maximization.
"Pay less if it's not urgent" doesn't sound evil or anything. Like the pandemic has proved that delivery workers are a scarce resource, what do you want them to do, have a raffle?
In a competitive market, it really will be "pay less if it's not urgent". In particular, if you're a peon flying coach, you want some people flying first class, because they are effectively subsidizing your ticket. Bring on the rich!
The ecconmics of airplanes is different and do not apply. Here you want enough people paying for the cheap service that it makes money so they don't kill it. There is no advantage to a class of service that doesn't pay for itself in this space, you just move up to the next one.
Actually the worst thing would be most people choosing this as they may decide that the cheaper class isn't worth serving at all.
I don't think this analysis is correct. No one's going to offer a service if it's cheaper not to, yes. But if there's only one class of service, you have to make $X on each order to cover your fixed costs. If there are multiple classes, the cheapest class could end up being $(0.8X) and still allow you to make more money overall.
Think of it as an SLA. People optimise for different outcomes, some people need their groceries in a 1 hour timeslot because they have other commitments.
It's not at a loss, it's just at a rate they couldn't support if it were there only rate.
As a thought experiment, suppose there are a few local zillionaires start making "platinum" orders to local markets each day, with a $1M delivery charge. Will the markets stop accepting otherwise-profitable peon orders? No. That part is easy. But what will happen to the price of peon orders as the markets compete? They can afford to lower those prices a bit, since their fixed costs are spread across all customers, and the zillionaires are already paying the lion's share.
If you doubt this, imagine you run one of the markets and your competitor drops the price of his peon orders by five percent. Are you going to allow the competitor to take all of your business, forgoing the profit you'd otherwise earn?
There's three broad ways to determine distribution of scarce goods. You've missed one.
In no particular order, those ways are:
1. Highest bidder.
2. Lottery.
3. Highest need.
There is no intrinsic 'fairness' to either of those three priorities to distribution - what any person thinks is the fairest method completely depends on their value system.
However, regardless of your value system, and your opinion on which of these is the most fair, you can probably agree that for luxury goods, #1 is a reasonably accurate proxy for #3... And that for life-necessary staples, it is not.
In the case of grocery delivery in the middle of a pandemic, people with pre-existing conditions, the elderly, and people living adjacent to those first two groups rank much higher on #3, than your run-of-the-mill 20-something-year-old. For the former, delivery is not a luxury good. For the latter, it is.
If they are truly life-necessary. But it is quite likely that the elderly and the pre-existing conditions folk will survive getting the bread tomorrow instead of in two hours.
We already have a bypass mechanisms for the "I'll die if I don't get it in two hours". It's the emergency services system and it's there when your life is in danger and it's currently overprovisioned to ensure capacity.
Which is why I was talking about grocery delivery as a whole, as opposed to two-hour grocery delivery.
The problem is if the express versus economy stratification does not actually increase overall system throughput - but instead, attracts more load to the system, as people who don't need it, but were otherwise going to the store end up using it for convenience.
For a Linux user, you can already build such a system yourself quite trivially by getting an FTP account, mounting it locally with curlftpfs, and then using SVN or CVS on the mounted filesystem. From Windows or Mac, this FTP account could be accessed through built-in software.
It's almost disheartening that there are folks out there that like the clump, cluttered busy mess that is sourcehut.org over the clean, beautiful design of the Stripe website.
The Stripe website (just checked it out) might be visually clean, but it is also clean from information what it is all about. SourceHut in comparison is packed with inforformation. I mean, compare the two side by side (i had to scale them down because at 100% they believe i'm using a mobile phone - damn, how much i hate "responsive" CSS, all it responds to is to assumptions its web developers make):
On the left side SourceHut has almost everything you want to know, on the right side Stripe has... a couple of background images, one button to "START NOW" (start what?) and to contact sales (for what?).
Stripe's site is a classic case where form took precedence over function.
When I look at Stripe's website, I immediately read: "The new standard in online payments". Ok, they handle online payments, that's really clear.
When I look at Sourcehut, the first thing I read is that Drew DeVault posted: "Announcing the SourceHut project hub". Ok? Is that really the first thing I should know? Then I read further and still have zero idea what the actual tools are until I actually dig deeper.
The whole point of the Stripe website is to make people want to use Stripe. That's the function, and if a lot of form helps with that, the function achieved. And I'm pretty sure the Strips homepage is doing a good job drumming up business considering their success.
Stripe's website doesn't tell you anything about what exactly it provides though. At best you can infer that they provide some sort of API for accepting payments based on the code snippet they have at the bottom, but beyond that nothing else is there - and even that is something you have to infer.
SourceHut's site tells you what it does, how it does it, what features you can find in there and a bunch of other things. It is packed with information.
Not necessarily. You don't (well, most people) want to know what a product is, you want to know what it can do for you.
In other words, the value it offers you. How it enables you to achieve what you want to achieve. That's what matters, the technical functionality does not.
I don't care that Nike uses vulcanized rubber and cotton, I care that my friends will think they look cool, and thus make me look cool.
So they focus on communicating that value proposition rather than an info dump about the product.
Sourcehut says "lots of open source mini services that work without JavaScript". Cool, why do I care? Is there a cost saving? Would my devs prefer this? Can it do something other paid services can't? Why should I use it?
It's disheartening to me that there are people out there that like the busy yet low-density over-designed mess that is stripe.com over the simple, functional design of the sourcehut website.
It's particularly disheartening to me because those people seem to include all web designers.
For a Linux user, you can already build such a system yourself quite trivially by getting an FTP account, mounting it locally with curlftpfs, and then using SVN or CVS on the mounted filesystem. From Windows or Mac, this FTP account could be accessed through built-in software.
My family has ordered online from all three of these retailers during this pandemic. Walmart and Target may have roots in traditional retail, but their online pipeline is quite robust these days.
This is an anecdotal datapoint that is insanely useless in the real world, but the fact that it is the top comment is typical of this site.