A look at the plight of “pickers”, in-store shoppers fulfilling online grocery orders, and the cottage industry around tech tools that make them more efficient
The technology needed to fulfill orders is costly for stores, and the workers who pick items off the shelves often feel the pressure of being tracked. Tweets: @sapna , @greenhousenyt , @nytimesbusiness , @f_kaltheuner , @lyman_brian , and @harrysiegel Tweets: Sapna Maheshwari / @sapna : NEW: as people rushed to order groceries online this year, demand rose for workers to fulfill those orders. i dove into how stores are guiding and tracking grocery “pickers” and the technology being used to make them ever faster: https://www.nytimes.com/... Steven Greenhouse / @greenhousenyt : As Instacart & other online grocery delivery companies pressure their grocery pickers to work faster & faster and increasingly monitor their every move, online grocery delivery is becoming a miserable job as workers are increasingly treated like automatons https://www.nytimes.com/... https://twitter.com/... @nytimesbusiness : Nick Fraser's goals as a “picker” at the local grocery store: retrieve each item within 30 seconds and find 95% of a customer's grocery list. After a while, though, he said: “They're asking me to go faster, faster and faster, and where does it end?” https://www.nytimes.com/... Frederike Kaltheuner / @f_kaltheuner : On the human labour and worker surveillance behind online grocery shopping https://www.nytimes.com/... Brian Lyman / @lyman_brian : “At first I wanted to do good, and I'm kind of competitive. But the more I started doing it, it was like, they're asking me to go faster, faster and faster, and where does it end?” https://www.nytimes.com/... Harry Siegel / @harrysiegel : “I wanted to do good...but the more I started doing it, it was like, they're asking me to go faster, faster and faster, and where does it end?” ... “We're in the business of making humans and robots work together but making the humans much more productive and much more accurate” https://twitter.com/...
Context & Ripple Effects
Online grocery's pandemic surge turned store aisles into fulfillment centers: chains that had already been prodded by Amazon into experimenting with smart carts, dynamic price tags, and automated in-store warehouses suddenly needed humans to walk those aisles on behalf of remote shoppers, and the curbside pickup boom at chains like Target made in-store picking a core job rather than a side task. Sapna Maheshwari's reporting maps what that job actually looks like: stores and Instacart guiding and tracking pickers with software, while a cottage industry of startups sells ever-faster picking tools.
First-order effects
- Pickers now work under algorithmic measurement — timed routes and monitored output — trading speed gains for constant visibility into their performance, while their employers absorb the high fixed cost of the fulfillment technology.
Second-order effects
- Workers will optimize for the metric rather than the intent, just as Amazon delivery drivers in Chicago hung smartphones in trees near stations to grab orders first; expect similar gaming of picking software wherever quotas bind.
- The time-pressure and pay complaints documented among NYC on-demand delivery workers, where labor organizing efforts are underway, give grocery pickers an adjacent playbook — and unions a new constituency inside traditional retail.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds, the tracked human picker becomes a transitional role: the same cost logic that pushed shippers like FedEx toward robot arms with computer vision points grocers toward automated micro-fulfillment once volumes justify it, leaving the surveillance infrastructure in place either way.
The trend: Online grocery is converting retail floor jobs into algorithm-managed warehouse work, with worker-tracking tooling arriving first and full automation waiting on volume.