[openczun]

Having worked with warehouses and warehousing systems, this is actually a real problem.

A normal non-refrigerated warehouse can pick items (grab from the shelf) well in advance of the "pick up" time for carriers, so orders are ready to go when the truck arrives.

In Ernie's model, it becomes a challenge having items ready when customers arrive, yet minimize the amount of time perishables are out of refrigeration.

This could be addressed a few ways : 1. Asking the customer roughly when they expect to pick up their orders 2. Staging orders in refrigerated and non-refrigerated sections for quick final assembly at pick-up 3. A mechanism like you've described to give some advanced warning to the warehouse.

Very interesting stuff indeed -- I'm envisioning some wicked cool cross and upselling opportunities with punchfork.com's API.

[rsbrown]

Option number 2 is what we have planned. We have been working with a warehouse engineer that worked for a failed grocery delivery service. Note: it was delivery that killed them, not the challenges of warehouse management.