Even better, my brother was working at a chain called Taco Tico around that time, and we nicknamed him “The Prince of the Taco Palace”.
Yes, I’m aware, but if they did mainstream this form of pickup/payment, it would make things easier for many folks with time constraints or issues with in-person shopping, like wheelchair-bound folks (who can still drive) who might find it difficult to navigate narrow aisles packed with ambulatory wanderers and checkout counters that can be too high to maneuver past easily.
Yeah most of them seem to operate on a “text and we’ll load your car” model. But even before COVID some of the larger chains were doing like a crates in a locker approach as part of their delivery services.
I think the thing is that supermarket buildings are a lot like the other things we’re talking about. They seem difficult to repurpose. I only ever seem to see them being turned into other supermarkets.
If one is vacant you never seem to see an office complex go in the space. Or brewery, or something. Quite a lot of the supermarkets I see have been a supermarket of one sort of another for decades, the one in my home town the building is 60 or so years old. Some near by have been grocery stores of one sort or another since the 30s.
I only ever see the more modern pickup setups in newly built ones. Retrofitting newer infrastructure into these things seems to be as expensive/undesirable as converting them into other things.
I recall an old Taco Bell in OC somewhere that was repurposed as a Vietnamese restaurant. Fast forward a few years and it had burned down, only to be rebuilt as a Vietnamese restaurant in the same Taco Bell style.
