Target to roll out pickup service in 18 area locations

As competition among brick andmortar stores gets tighter, retailers are offering more ways to bring shoppers to their doors — but often they don’t need to leave the parking lot.

On Monday, Target is rolling out its pickup service, dubbed DriveUp, at stores across the country, including 18 locations in southwestern Pennsylvania — from Butler and Cranberry to the north, Homestead and East Liberty around the city, as well as Monroeville, Harmar, Upper St. Clair and Washington.

Customers can place an order through the Target app and go to their local store the same day. An employee will bring the order to their car. There’s no charge for the service, which is available at more than 1,550 stores. That’s just shy of the Minneapolis- based retailer’s total of 1,850 locations.

“We did 2 million DriveUp orders in 2018, and it’s been a popular feature,” spokeswoman Jill Lewis said. “Customers use it when there is bad weather or they have young kids they don’t want to take out of car seats or just want to make a quick Target run between other errands.”

The DriveUp expansion is being timed for the back- to- school shopping season, Ms. Lewis said.

Though it’s still a relatively small portion of overall sales, click- and- collect is becoming an important part of retailers’ business models, Jennifer Bartashus, a Bloomberg Intelligence analyst, wrote in a research note on July 12.

“Walmart, Target and Kroger are rapidly expanding buy- online, pick- up- atstore services, which resonate with young families,” Ms. Bartashus noted. “Finding parking and navigating large stores with children can make it hard to keep trips quick and on budget.

“The service attracts an incremental set of customers, costs less and often prompts in- store purchases,” she said. “This all helps lock in customer loyalty and enable retailers to capture a greater portion of monthly food budgets.”

Meanwhile, Walmart this month unveiled a new Pickup Tower at its Greensburg Supercenter, allowing customers to use a sort of high- tech vending machine near the entrance to pick up online orders rather than walking to the back of the store. The Greensburg store also plans to add grocery pickup on Aug. 20.

To use the Pickup Tower, customers place their order online. When the item arrives in the store, a Walmart employee loads the item into the tower and a bar code is sent to the customer’s smartphone. When they arrive, shoppers scan the bar code to receive their order. The service is free.

“The Pickup Tower is a dynamic system that can store a wide range of items of varying sizes,” the Bentonville, Ark.- based company said in a statement. “The number of items and their size ultimately determine the how many items it can hold. On average, the Pickup Tower can hold about 300 items, ranging up to the size of a mediumsized microwave.”

The upgrades are part of Walmart’s estimated $ 83 million investment in Pennsylvania this fiscal year, the company said.