This goes against labor trends in the supermarket industry since the early 1900s, and would increase labor needs considerably. The original grocery stores were full-service like this, but assortment was still small and tastes were provincial. Supermarkets have been shedding labor consistently since the full-service days, and are managed towards ever increasing the UPLH metric (Units Per Labor Hour). Instacart serves as a sort of stop gap measure during the uncertainties of this pandemic. The nature of Instacart "hiring" is non-binding: employees are not bound to do any amount of work, and Instacart is under no obligation to provide it. These 250,000 workers are not guaranteed any amount of wages or hours, which is much different than if the supermarket industry tried to do what you propose. That approach is much more appealing to the supermarket industry: as work surges, people who need the work do it, and as the work subsides, they fade into the wood work. Personally I advocate for strong worker rights and a healthy labor market, but it will take more than a pandemic to get the supermarket industry to increase their direct workforce significantly.
Here in Ontario, Canada we have an online food delivery service (https://grocerygateway.com) and they built a super-automated distribution factory to help run this (and all of their stores in the area).
A distribution center in the UK has already mastered this:
> The Ocado Andover CFC is a three-storey grid of storage crates containing groceries. On top of the grid a fleet of 1,100 robots grab items and deliver them to “pick stations” where “personal shoppers” assemble orders for delivery. According to Ocado, an order of 50 items takes five minutes to pick and pack.
Google "automated grocery distribution", there's plenty of examples.
This is essentially unskilled labour moving boxes from one point to another. The exception is vegetables/fruit where a human discards the bad stuff before it goes into another box for delivery on a truck. 95% of that process could be automated. Including eventually the delivery drivers in between the distribution center <-> retail endpoint pickup centers (where consumers and last-mile Instacart/delivery drivers can go in person for pickup - I'm assuming humans will be needed for home delivery for a long time).
Instacarts biggest drawback is the cost and how they nickel-and-dime you, but GroceryGateway is run by the grocery store itself, and it's much better and actually helps you save money by shows you all the deals in the interface (imagine sorting a grocery store by discounts and price, as you walk through it gets more expensive). There is very little markup vs the stores, I've found it to be cheaper in practice, especially factoring in my time.
A fully integrated/automated version of this with far less urban real estate + labour costs will bring the prices down significantly.
I have a feeling only smaller luxury/farmers market/vegetable+fruit+meat only (+ semi-automated pantry section) shops will exist in the future. You don't really need to pick up most stuff by hand, but an in-person browsing UX can still be useful. Ikea stores are halfway to figuring this out.
Grocerygateway you select like white bread and hope that yoir brand and brown bread doesn't come. You select apples and they are out and will give you pears.
InstantCart felt modern. You select the exact brand size. When the morning comes you will see the items the person found in real time on the app. The useful part was when an item is not found the delivery person will select a replacement that you see in real time and you can reject or replace with other items. For those that want a more interactive shopping experience I recommend, feels like I'm on the phone with someone as they shop.
With Ocado I select a time slot and they know what will be available with very few substitutions. Definitely not apples-for-pears level.
It's up to them to tune. They could make it exact(don't overpromise any stock) but then be stuck with unsold stock due to customers amending their orders. Or they can oversell slightly and offer refunds or returns for unwanted substitutions, which is what they do.
In the early 1900s they didn't have a lot of the technology we have today. There are things that can be automated away as well as many other logistical optimizations that can be made if you're designing the store as a warehouse instead of both a warehouse and a customer experience. That experience moves online. Of course this is more of a long term thing and would require a big investment.
Something like Trader Joes would be great for this. Very limited number of SKUs (e.g. 1-2 kinds of wheat bread, rather than 10). If you combine with automation, could get the costs down considerably. But I'd bet most of the labor hours are going to be burned on the delivery itself, not the assembling of the order.
