Wal-Mart works to refine online grocery shopping
BeNTONVIlle, ark. — As Sam’s Club began allowing customers to buy their groceries online and pick them up in person, the Wal-Mart-owned chain of stores noticed a frequent conundrum: Customers were having to wait too long in the warehouses to get their goods.
The culprit, they determined, was frozen foods. They couldn’t keep these items alongside the dry and packaged goods in an order, so when a customer arrived, workers would have to make their way across the sprawling store to get the frozen items. This presented a wrinkle in achieving the goal of faster shopping trips — the central purpose of store pickups.
On Wednesday, during a presentation at its annual shareholders meeting, WalMart technologists debuted a new tool that solves that problem.
After you’ve placed the order, a notification on your phone prompts you to “check in” when you’re ready to pick it up. Before you hop in your car to retrieve your order at Sam’s Club, you go to that check-in screen and let the store know how long it will take for you to get there. Workers will then assemble those frozen items with the rest of your order so it is ready just in time for your arrival.
“Our focus at this point is to make sure we nail down the customer experience, and soon enough, we’ll start rolling it out to further clubs,” said Eytan Daniyalzade, a leader on Wal-Mart’s mobile innovation team.
This new feature makes clear that WalMart is doubling down on its efforts to get customers to rethink the way they shop for groceries, perhaps the most mundane and essential of retail purchases.
Although shoppers have already moved in droves to buy clothes, electronics and books online, they have stubbornly clung to the old-school way of filling their pantries and refrigerators. In 2014, researchers with IBIS World estimated that online grocery sales were a paltry 1.9 percent of total grocery sales.
With the presentations Wednesday and Thursday, it was evident that Wal-Mart’s plan of attack for winning your grocery dollars in the digital era will be to blend the in-store and online experience, to make it easy for shoppers to bounce easily from one channel to the other.
On Thursday, the company showed off its Wal-Mart Pickup-Grocery center, one of five pilot facilities built specifically for customers to collect grocery orders that they placed online.
The center is not attached to a traditional Wal-Mart store; it is a stand-alone location where consumers never have to leave their car to pick up their groceries. After typing their name or order number into a kiosk, they pull into a designated parking spot and Wal-Mart workers put their groceries right in the trunk. While the company will not reveal specific expansion plans, it says the offering is getting high customer-satisfaction scores.
“It’s a lot of working moms. I get stories all the time about how, ‘Yeah, I order online and my husband comes and picks up,’” operations manager Ellen Martinez said.
THE WASHINGTON POST