Minimum Basket Filler Has Entered Formal Review
Once minimum basket filler prevents one awkward moment, it must remain in force for the rest of the routine.
SUBJECT: Annual Review of Minimum Basket Filler (MBF): FY2021
Status: Active. Under review at request of no one in particular.
Background
A temporary workaround for minimum basket filler became the default because it worked once. The workaround was a tube of toothpaste. The cart was forty-three rupees below the free delivery threshold. The toothpaste was needed eventually. It was added. Delivery arrived free.
This was March 2020. The toothpaste has since been replaced, twice, by the same logic. The delivery has remained free. The workaround has become the method.
Current Deployment
Other people have begun planning around the workaround and quietly preserving it. In practical terms: a household member who orders groceries without checking the MBF threshold is asked, with some patience, whether they checked the total. The answer is that they did not think it mattered. The response is that it always matters. Neither party can reconstruct when "always" became the correct modifier.
A person using the ordinary method, which is to simply pay the delivery fee when the cart falls below threshold, now has to explain why they ignored the established procedure. The explanation is typically: the delivery fee is twenty rupees and the toothpaste is eighty-five. The response to this explanation is that the toothpaste would have been needed anyway. This is true approximately half the time.
The Sympathy Problem
The sympathy this review extends is reluctant because the minimum basket filler is not irrational. Routine is considered proof even when nobody remembers the original reason. The reason, in this case, is that saving twenty rupees on every order across fifty orders is a thousand rupees, which is real money, and the toothpaste was genuinely needed at least some of those times.
What the review finds harder to defend is the second layer. Screenshots of cart totals. Notes about what qualifies as a good filler item versus a filler item that will sit in the pantry for six months. A mild disagreement about whether the extra bottle of cooking oil counted last Tuesday.
The delivery saves a trip. The order has created its own trip.
Finding
No revision at this time. The procedure will be revisited when someone calculates the total hours spent on MBF management and presents the number in a format that requires a response.