Stop & Shop set to offer ‘same-day pick-up’
Stop & Shop is offering customers the option to get groceries within hours of placing orders online.
The Massachussetts-based grocery giant announced Thursday that it is launching a new “same-day online pick-up” option at select stores through its Peapod by Stop & Shop platform. The added offering through the grocer’s sister company will target 20 locations in the Northeast to start, with more expected to follow, according to officials.
“As we continue to improve the omnichannel experience for our customers, we plan to roll out 175 of these ‘click-and-collect’ locations by the end of the year,” said Stop & Shop President Mark McGowan in a news release. “We’re excited to offer our customers the convenience of shopping online for all the products available at their local store, which they can now pick-up in just a few hours.”
The same-day pickup service will kick off in Connecticut at Stop & Shop’s South Windsor store. It will join 10 Stop & Shop stores in Massachusetts, eight in Rhode Island and one in New York offering the program in its first wave.
Customers can place their orders on the Peapod website and select “pick-up” at their preferred store, setting a time window for the shopper to drive to the store. Participating locations will have around six designated parking spots for customers using the service.
Once parked, customers can call a phone number to alert the store team gathering their items so the team can bring the groceries to the car.
The same-day service costs $2.95. New pick-up customers can receive the service free for 90 days.
The announcement comes a couple months after a company-wide strike in New England, but union representatives said the two are not related.
“The company has to do everything that it can to increase its customer base,” said Tom Wilkinson, president of the UFCW Local 371 in Westport. “The company has to do everything to maintain and grow the business and if that’s a piece of it — and I’m sure they’ve done their studies on it — they are
going to tell us this is what the company wants and they are going to do it.”
More than 31,000 Stop & Shop workers in Connecticut, Massachusetts and Rhode Island went on strike April 11, staying off the job for 11 days before union representatives and company officials reached common ground.
Among the list of hotly debated topics behind the walk out was the increased presence of automation in stores and loss of jobs.
“This is not something that is a result of the strike,” Wilkinson said. “This is something that the industry is going towards. … If a customer wants this, any company is going to do what it can to provide the service the customer wants.”
That’s been evident across different industries as businesses embrace digital innovation to improve business. Grocery store chains are no exception.
Stop & Shop joins companies like Amazon and Walmart, which have continued to expand and experiment with home delivery services for customers, according to national reports.
According to data from Deutsche Bank in national reports, online grocery sales make up 3 percent of the $800 billion food retail market. That’s expected to quadruple by 2025 with the growth of online ordering for pickup.