The Verge:
Starting this fall in the US, Walmart customers in select cities can choose to have their groceries delivered directly into their refrigerators when away from home. The InHome service will use Walmart vehicles and its own workers equipped with proprietary wearable cameras. Using undisclosed “smart entry technology,” Walmart employees will be able to enter homes to make deliveries, while customers will be able to control access and watch the deliveries remotely.
This raises so many questions for me. Would you allow someone you don’t know to enter your home to put groceries in your refrigerator? This is one step beyond Amazon’s front door access that let’s them stick a package just inside your house.
And what about the footage of the interior of your home that is captured and put on the internet? How is this footage secured? Who can see it? It is available for you to see on the net, so the potential is there for other lurkers to see it as well.
Wondering if my kids will someday see this all as normal.
“Would you allow someone you don’t know to enter your home to put groceries in your refrigerator?”
Nope. No thanks. Hard pass.
No. Just no.
First off, no. Second, though, the delivery industry in general has a theft issue with porch pirates so I understand the motivation of the online retailers to find some way to not leave packages in the open. Finally, grocery delivery is weird. Unless you’re delivering to a household that has a stay at home spouse or where someone works from home, the delivery hours are compressed to evening and weekend. I imagine part of this is trying to be able to deliver during daytime even to households where no one is there to accept delivery.
The delivery industry seems to be bending over backwards to avoid the obvious solution of offering delivery in the evenings and on weekends, and of offering delivery at a time of your choosing. Those solutions would require them to, you know, actually make changes in how they do business (like shifting their working hours from 9-5 to 1-9. Oh the humanity!)
Instead they keep coming up with these crazy schemes that very few people are going to be comfortable with.
True for some but not all. Here in Vancouver, the grocery delivery company I worked for starting making scheduled deliveries at 7am and delivered up until 10pm. I hated that job. 🙂
Flirting with disaster
Since when are Walmart employees the most trustworthy people on the planet?
The low hanging fruit here are the elderly and mobility-challenged individuals.
“Just because you can doesn’t mean you should.”
Not if I had a private home or condo, no. Not even a little bit. Not Wal*Mart, not Nordstrom, not Piggly Wiggly, and not Apple.
If you can get into my apartment building and leave stuff in front of my door, fine.
We rarely both leave the apartment at the same time. There’s almost always someone here. Ring the damn doorbell.
What could go wrong? Next up, the dry cleaner goes into your bedroom and gets your clothes, cleans them, and returns them? Your Car mechanic picks up your car and changes the oil and returns it? (Meanwhile robbing a bank with your car the getaway vehicle.) Google reads my email and give me a summary? Oh wait, they’re reading it already, so why not?