I can honestly say I have noticed a big difference since they turned this new system on. I get more items per box and never got 1 item per box anymore. At first I thought they were being cheap - but its good to know they were becoming smart.
I have been a FD customer for many years and although it takes them awhile to react, they at least take the feedback and try to do something with it.
I've been an FD customer for 3 years and I am pretty impressed with their operation as well. The usability of their site is very good and they have a lot of innovative ways of doing business.
- Their sliced meats and cheeses usually have a sticker on them containing the slicer's number and an e-mail address asking for feedback on the slicing.
- They recently switched their egg carton packaging from a plastic bag with foam sheets to shredded, recycled cardboard.
- Their delivery trucks recently switched to all use biodiesel only.
- As this article states, they've cut down their packing and boxing materials and I expect it to get better as they switch to the returnable plastic containers.
- Throughout all of this they remain very competitive in terms of produce quality and pricing. It's cheaper and better quality than the grocery stores in my area.
Does anyone know if this problem is NP-Complete? It sounds fairly similar to the knapsack problem, so much so that this might be as hard as said problem. However, I'm not sure if these specific conditions could be shown to be in NP.
My hopes of mentally writing this off as a straightforward implementation exercise of well-known optimization heuristics have been spoiled. Maybe I couldn't have just sat down and banged it out in a few days with a little Googling and going over old college lecture notes. Damn you, Hacker News!
Indeed, I thought this was going to be an interesting application of the knapsack problem. Instead, this quote leads me to think it's the inherent difficulties of concurrency and synchronization:
"We had to write an enormous amount of code," Mr. Ackerman said, "because any one of 10,000 products can go to any point at any time."
I have been a FD customer for many years and although it takes them awhile to react, they at least take the feedback and try to do something with it.