Publix Vaccine Scheduling

Seeing as how republicans consider the private sector far more useful than the government, I thought it would be nice to review the marvelous private sector job Publix is doing with their vaccine sign up system:

First thing to note is they make the claim they couldn't operate a waiting list because of the "crush" of people who would sign up.

So instead they run it like trying to score concert tickets. Every few days you can drag yourself out of bed at 7 AM and open their web page to try and get an appointment (no crush there with everyone signing in at the same time, huh?).

Basically you watch the 60 second countdown timer go from 60 to zero over and over and over and over and over again for an hour or two hoping that the next automatic page refresh will finally give you a chance to book an appointment.

If the magic book appointment button finally shows up you get to fill out all kinds of information on screen after screen (information you could have filled out ahead of time if the software wasn't designed specifically to prevent you from getting an appointment).

Finally at the end of this process, you get to pick your location and time. There isn't an "Anywhere and anytime will do" button, you have to choose a specific pharmacy from a list of locations you never heard of and a specific time for that pharmacy.

OK, you pick one at random, and you're done, right? Nope. You are told that that appointment was already taken, and you have to pick again. Does it take you back to the list of locations and time? Nope, it takes you back almost to the beginning so you have to use vast amounts of time filling out the same damned forms one more time, making certain that someone else will have already taken the appointment time you pick on your next try.

After doing this a while, you give up in disgust without ever getting an appointment.

Let's rant about some of these issues a little more:

The "crush" from a waiting list. Let's round up and say Florida has 25,000,000 people living in it. Let's be really generous and say they are all eligible for the vaccine (or eventually will be). Probably 100 bytes of information could easily describe everything you need to know for a waiting list entry. Let's be generous and allow 1000 bytes. Thats a total of no more than 25 gigabytes. Cheap hard drives these days are 4 terabytes. One cheap drive could hold the database required 100 times over.

Having demolished the "crush" argument over space, that leaves time and bandwidth. Yes if all 25 million tried to sign up for the waiting list at once, you'd probably bog down the web page. But if the web page isn't responding, you could try again tomorrow, and once you do get on the list, you don't have to keep putting your information in over and over again. Heck they could use the technique they already use for booking an appointment to book a waiting list entry instead, and it would work the first time and you wouldn't have to keep doing it again and again every few days.

But there is a more global problem here. The incompetent administration shoved all the vaccine work to the states, and the incompetent states shoved it all to individual counties and private companies. Thus we wind up with a ridiculous collection of random different ways to sign up for the vaccine with no communication between them leaving the individual to seek them all out and try to sign up.

Imagine a competent administration which would have started on a coordinated vaccine sign up system as soon as vaccine development started. Imagine just one place to sign up. But no, the private sector does such a better job at everything, we wouldn't want the gummint to interfere in our right to die while waiting to sign up for a vaccine.

In Contrast...

There was an article in the paper that said Walmart is now offering vaccinations, not anywhere close in Palm Beach county, but I'm only slightly north of Broward. I was able to schedule an appointment on my very first try at the Walmart I used to drive past every day on the way to work in Pompano Beach. No watching screen refresh, no being told the time I picked was taken while filling out forms. A simple and flawless process (or flawless if they actually have vaccine when I get to my appointment). [Update: I did get my first shot (Moderna) a few hours ago, no side effects yet].

The biggest annoyance was being required to create a Walmart account before I could try to schedule the appointment. No doubt this will lead to floods of marketing crap.