Two Hypotheses on Sudden Delivery Problems

My household has has had a "Walmart Plus" membership for a couple of years now. Since we do probably 2/3 of our grocery shopping at Walmart, the "free delivery on orders over $35" seems well worth the annual membership fee, even setting aside the included streaming media platform subscription (you can choose between Paramount Plus and Peacock). It saves us both extra trips into town and the time we'd spend in the store.

It usually works out just fine. Occasionally an order will be missing an item (and Walmart cheerfully refunds out money). Also occasionally we'll get stuff we didn't order because the driver got mixed up. That's even better because Walmart won't take the stuff back, they just tell you to keep it, and it's usually stuff we do use.

But the last few days have been interesting. We placed an order for delivery Sunday evening, and it didn't arrive. "Delayed due to driver availability issues." Reschedule or cancel.

We rescheduled for Monday evening. Same outcome.

This time we canceled, waited a few hours, and did the same order (plus more stuff we had put on our grocery lists in the meantime) from scratch. I decided to set the delivery time frame to daytime and see if it would actually happen, otherwise we could make a physical evening trip to the store.

It arrived.

Nothing like this has ever happened before with Walmart Plus, for us or for anyone we know who's mentioned using the service. Off the cuff I suspect we've ordered for delivery close to 100 times, with only one "delay" ever and that by only a couple of hours because a driver's vehicle broke down.

What's up with that?

Well, Walmart uses a mix of employee and contractor drivers, and evening delivery seems to lean hard on the contractor end. Considering that, I have two hypotheses:

1. It's college graduation time in Gainesville, Florida. In fact, University of Florida graduation was last weekend. If a lot of the evening contract drivers are students doing it part-time, there may have been a sudden exodus of graduates (and non-graduates going home for summer) that Walmart couldn't replace in a timely manner. 
2. Gas prices are up by 50% since Trump shit the bed in the Middle East. Which means the contractors aren't making as much money unless they're either getting bonuses to help cover the higher price of filling their tanks or are able to increase the number of deliveries they make per trip. Late evening delivery is probably less popular than other time frames, meaning less ability to stack a larger number of orders into one trip.

Any other ideas?

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First Letter: L

Non Sequitur, Vote By Mail Edition

Los Angeles Times letter to the editor headline (paywalled, so I can only go with that headline claim, not any other facts of the writer's situation:

I’m in my 90s and I’ve given up driving. Voting by mail is my only option

Yep, only option.

Except for Uber.

Or a taxi, if those still exist in the writer's area.

Or asking a friend or relative for a ride to the polling place.

Or calling up the local party organization or political campaign of your choice, if they haven't already called you (in urban areas, election day is usually characterized by multiple phone calls offering voters transportation to the polls).

If you're 95 years old, there's a very good chance you live in some kind of "retirement community," ranging from "people have their own houses/apartments but there's infrastructure to support their needs" to full-on "nursing home." Many, maybe most, of those places provide transportion on both an individual basis ("I need to go to the doctor for my appointment") and group basis ("the van leaves for the mall at noon and returns at 3pm") as part of the package.

So it's highly unlikely that this writer's only option is to vote by mail. It's the most convenient. It's the least expensive. It's arguably more secure. But it's not the only option.