Today I got a notification from a store that an item I had purchased for Cyber Monday has arrived and that I could pick it up whenever I was ready. It seemed like a good option since instore pickup was free and the place was very close to me. Having an in store pickup option isn’t really new nowadays. But for this store in particular it seemed a little odd at first which made me think they never tried to develop a system from ground up.
The first odd thing was that when I made the purchase and selected the item the shipping address appeared to be labeled as if I lived in the building per se. Usually for an in-store pickup the stores would simply place the items in storage and when you pick it up they would hand you the item. In this case I suppose what happened is that they delivered the item from their warehouse as everything was packaged to be delivered as if it was going to your home. Except in this case they can save money by delivering to the store as part of a regular weekly shipment.
So when I got to the store they asked for the order ID which was normal. Then the employee took out stacks of paper that had all these in-store pick up orders. She had to manually sift through everything in an attempt to find my order. That took awhile and I had to sign on that paper that I was the right person. She then proceeded to go to this locker of sort where it seemed like all the boxes were just dumped into their and she had to manually try and find it. Once she did that she mentioned she had to go to this computer to type in that the shipment had been picked up. Upon loading up you can see the interface seemed kind of retro. Ultimately everything as process though.
It makes you wonder like here why don’t they just do everything from the computer to begin with? My best guess is that they simply improvised as a business to give people this option as opposed to investing in the proper resources for a more modern day and practical solution. It’s almost like a supermarket seeing that it can be beneficial to have things like a restaurant or dining area within the complex and so their solution is to put some chairs and a table in a small section of a store. Like literally just putting it there with no real design or functionality thought.
I think in these cases if you are going to offer things like these to stay modern day then you should eventually invest the time and energy to develop the solutions and resources dedicated for it.