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I mean: Domino's also has a limited staff.

And most of the process is very similar between Domino's and Kroger.

Just pick out a selection of stuff on a website, and order it. They both provide timely status updates of that order. They both have varying staff levels and workloads. They both certainly have days when they're running very far behind, and days when they feel like they don't have much to keep busy with.

They both have pickup and delivery options; sometimes, with different per-item prices, deals, or fees for each option.

But that's where the similarities end.

If a person orders a pizza at 6:05 and it happens to be ready by 6:30, Domino's doesn't make that person wait until 8:00 to pick it up. They want it gone; the sooner, the better. A person can pick it up (in the store, or they'll bring it out to the car) as soon as it is ready. Domino's does not want any queues at all; neither inbound, nor outbound. And this makes sense: They're in the business of selling pizzas, not storing pizzas.

Kroger isn't like that. If a person orders groceries at 6:05 and the order is ready by 6:30, then: They hold the groceries hostage until 8:00. It's as if an otherwise-complete order just isn't ripe to be picked up by a customer until it has had time to purge itself in a waiting area -- regardless of workload. The queue is mandatory, and is governed not by the physical readiness of the order but instead by the clock on the wall.

This is inconceivably stupid and unnecessary. It serves no benefit to me, nor to the corporation, nor to the employees that work for that corporation. One might think that they'd be aware that they're in the business of selling groceries, but this mandatory purgatory shows otherwise.

(I'll betcha McMaster-Carr doesn't sit on stuff while a clock runs. That's a Kroger specialization. :) )

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One difference is that the Domino's employee's job is to make your pizza. None of their other duties are exactly rocket science. I ran a pizza place, I'd know. Meanwhile, preparing your grocery order is maybe the third priority on any given Kroger employee's list, behind running a register, stocking shelves, inventory, cleaning, tending to Kroger's spastic self-checkout machines, ...

I guess I prefer my groceries to be ready at a predictable time, rather than sitting around waiting between 1 and N hours. No experience I've ever had with food delivery in the age of DoorDash has made me think "yeah, I want more of this experience in my life."

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Oh, man.

My nephew works for Kroger, primarily picking stock for online orders.

He's a good dude and I enjoy hanging out with him, but I absolutely promise you that he doesn't do all of those jobs. He doesn't do anything quickly-enough to shift roles like that, and never has. To use a polite managerial description: He definitely works at his own pace.

I don't see that kind of task diversity at the store I usually shop at, either.

The register people do register stuff. The self-checkout people do self-checkout stuff. The order-pickers do order-picking. The people who bag groceries and fetch carts just bag groceries and fetch carts. The produce folks do produce. The florists florist. And so forth.

Sometimes I see a management-type range-walking from one problem to the next, but even that's exceptional.

It's the only real grocery store we have in the small city in which I live, so I get to spend a fair bit of time there whether I like it or not. I've spent years passively becoming familiar with the people who work there, and the jobs they do.

If they moved around much between different roles, I'd have noticed it by now.

(It's also a union shop, which may have something to do with it. When high-speed shifts from pushing a broom and heads out to the parking lot to fetch carts before he starts sorting produce, he's taking work away from the people who normally do those jobs and diminishing their roles. Unions may tend to dislike that kind of thing.

We didn't shift around much when I worked in union retail, either. It was a big deal for me to spend a day away from my department to help out with another one that was short-handed, and an opportunity was always presented for me to say "No, I'll just keep working where I normally work."

It was an even bigger deal if they needed help over on the grocery side of the store, which had a completely different union with a completely different contract. The union guys had to agree to allow it every time before that could happen.)