Last summer, Capsule—an online pharmacy startup that had won attention with its speedy prescription-drug deliveries and quirky practice of addressing customers in emails and over the phone as “dear”—had a crisis on its hands in New York, its most important market.
Beginning in August, Capsule customers in the city began experiencing dayslong delays in the delivery of medicines that in some cases were critical to their health. The cause: A high-tech new Capsule facility in Harlem, the centerpiece of which was an automated system with a robotic arm for dispensing medicines, was malfunctioning, according to nine current and former Capsule employees. The startup had just relocated its New York operations to the new site from a facility in midtown Manhattan as part of an ambitious project, code-named NYC 3.0, intended to cut labor costs and increase the number of orders Capsule could handle.
Instead, complaints began pouring into online review sites about the pharmacy’s service in New York as delays on customer orders mounted. “We’re imploding and creating a mess with multiple failures on the same orders,” a Capsule executive wrote in late September in an internal Slack channel devoted to the situation. While the automation project eventually helped reduce Capsule’s costs for delivering orders in New York, as of early this year those results were far short of its goals, according to former employees and internal documents viewed by The Information.
0 Commentaires