Every customer would like a thirty minute window. Here is the arithmetic that says why an honest two hours beats a thirty minute promise nobody keeps.
Every so often somebody asks whether we could deliver at half past six rather than between six and eight. It is a reasonable thing to want, and the answer is no, so here is why.
A delivery in Malé is not really a driving problem. The distances are tiny. The time goes on the things nobody counts: finding somewhere to stand the van, four floors of stairs, a customer who is in the shower, a road that has been dug up since yesterday, and the phone call to the person whose tomatoes were finished. Any one of those turns a ten minute stop into twenty five.
With a two hour window and a cap of ten orders, one late stop is absorbed by the window and nobody downstream hears about it. With a thirty minute promise, one late stop moves every remaining delivery of the evening, and by eight o'clock you are ringing people to apologise instead of delivering.
So the window is two hours and the cap is real. When a window is full it comes off the site. That is the whole mechanism, and it is also why you will sometimes find that the six o'clock slot is not there on a Thursday.
The other half of it is loading the van in delivery order rather than in basket order. Chilled goes in last and comes out first. That is the second reason for the evening windows: a frozen chicken in a van at two in the afternoon in May is not a frozen chicken by the time it reaches the fourth floor.
