Walmart will offer grocery order pickup

A personal shopper is something you might expect at Bergdorf Goodman or a boutique on Madison Avenue.

Not at the Walmart on Route 42 in Turnersville, N.J.

But that’s where you will find Joann Joseph and a team of Walmart workers each day, filling up shopping carts with boxes of cereal, Cheez-Its and peanuts.

Customers select their groceries online, and then the shoppers pick the items off the store shelves and deliver them to people when they arrive in the parking lot. Customers never have to step inside the store.

Walmart, one of the largest food retailers in the United States, sees grocery pickup as a way to marry its e-commerce business with its gigantic network of stores — a goal that has eluded many other retailers. The company began offering the service two years ago, and it is now available in about 1,000 of Walmart’s 4,699 stores across the country.

Grocery pickup is the latest salvo in Walmart’s retail battle with Amazon.

Many retailers are focused on new ways to deliver groceries to people’s homes — particularly in big cities. Walmart is betting big on the millions of Americans in suburban and rural areas who drive everywhere. The company is trying to make ordering groceries online and then picking them up in your car as seamless as a fast-food drive-through.

Groceries have become one of the most fiercely contested areas of retail. Amazon upped the ante in June with its $13.4 billion purchase of Whole Foods.

Walmart has been experimenting with different ways to get an edge. In a few cities, it works with Uber to deliver groceries to homes. And last month, Walmart said it would begin testing a home-delivery service in which a worker loads the food into the refrigerator, even when no one is home. The customer can watch the process remotely from a home security camera and track when the delivery worker enters and leaves the house.