[hildaman]

I got tired of being a cog in the Amazon machine and bought some merchandise from Jet.com last week. It was a sub-optimal experience.

This is what I bought:

-> $4.22 Q-tips Cotton Swabs 500 ct -> $16.32 iPhone 5/5s, iPhone SE, iPod Touch 5th/6th Gen Adidas Nylon Armband Case - Sports armband for adidas miCoach training system -> $6.95 iBungee Stretch Laces (26-Inch, Black Laces with Black Race Lock) -> $4.79 4 Philips AA Zinc Chloride Double A Batteries R6 1.5V Super Heavy Duty Battery -> $8.10 Monoprice Apple MFi Certified Lightning to USB Charge & Sync Cable, 3ft White -> $89.96 ASICS Men's GEL-Kayano 23 Running Shoes T646N

The order for the phone arm-band was cancelled and everything else shipped _separately_ - I Literally got 5 different packages in the mail - over a week with different items.

Had I gone with Amazon, I would have received - one, maybe two packages with everything. Infact, Jet probably lost money on most of the items they shipped to me.

Us techies sometimes tend to forget the real world (in this case customer experience) while playing with cool technology.

To me, an old fashioned optimizer running on a 15 year old AMD Opteron that delivers the appropriate real-world result is worth more than that F# and CUDA thing that seems to have over-optimized the problem to create a bad customer experience (getting 5 packages in a haphazard way).

[sdsdsdsdsds]

Its a little more complex than that. Batteries must be shipped seperately, as per regulations. You are assuming everything shipped form same warehouse.

Source. Worked on this problem for some years.

[vonmoltke]

I'm not aware of, and could not find, any such regulations that apply to non-lithium dry cell batteries.

[djchen]

I don't know if this is still the case but Jet doesn't handle fulfillment for all of the items on their store. I've bought stuff on Jet that were shipped from over e-commerce web sites.

[thomastjeffery]

Amazon does the same thing, but since it is primarily a fulfillment company, it does end up doing most of that itself.

[brianwawok]

Correct, many third party sellers ship things on Jet (just like on Amazon). Unlike Amazon, it is less clear who is shipping a given item.

[visarga]

Have you considered that F# CUDA and the delivery situation are not causally related? Maybe a good optimization system is programmed with bad constraints.

[kw71]

Wow the prices are incredible. At walmart grocery they list 500 swabs for $2. In the store, zinc batteries are $1 for four. However on the site they aren't even shown and want you to buy alkalines for $3. But zinc batteries are 24 for $0 at harbor freight with their regular coupon.

Walmart's online orders come from a million places similar to your Jet experience. I used it all the time, when the online prices were identical to the in-store prices. Spend $6 more to get free shipping! Ok, I'll take 50 pounds of cat litter, hope the UPS finance dept thanks you. I wonder why they put a stop to this :(