Online grocery orders put ‘custom’ into customer service

Sam Drucker’d be proud, don’t you reckon? The Hooterville storekeep on TV — and there go the millennials! Wait! Come back! I just want y’all to know that ordering groceries online and picking them up already sacked or boxed at the store isn’t as new as you might think — just the online part is.

Before that, it was the landline that was the main line to such customized customer service. And while I’m not 100 percent sure he did, I’ll bet Sam Drucker, a slight caricature of the kind of storekeepers that used to be everywhere, would oblige such a phoned-in request. And you say: Huh? Where to start? OK. Hooterville was the tiny burg in two 1960s TV shows, “Petticoat Junction” and “Green Acres.” Sam Drucker was the keeper of the general store. A general store was a little department store, where the “departments” might be as small as part of a shelf, especially when it came to such as notions and bobbins, which — oh, never mind. A landline was a telephone with no camera or apps, and wired to the wall, which used to be in about everybody’s home, oftentimes two or three of them.

Now, I’m really not trying to poke fun at people who came of age after the turn of the millennium. It’s possible that some of them never saw a landline, or at least never paid any attention to them because first, they were so commonplace and then, they became so irrelevant so fast to anyone with a cellphone, especially when cellphones got smart. Like I barely remember blackand-white TVs because once color ones came along, why would anyone have a black-and-white one?

One day, millennials will be explaining to their kids that people used to have to shop for groceries IN THE GROCERY STORE.

Price Edwards & Co. went on about this quite a bit in its 2016 retail property market summary (available at www. priceedwards.com).

First, reports of the death of brick-andmortar stores are greatly exaggerated — and have been since the internet was just an interactive robotic pup.

“In the world of retail, the internet is usually characterized as both the future of retail and the killer of brick-andmortar stores. The reality is much more nuanced,” according to the report by Jim Parrack, vice president and head of the firm’s retail division.

Parrack had some numbers:

Internet sales now make up about 9 percent of total retail sales; 30 percent of e-commerce sales go to Amazon; internet sales are growing rapidly; most experts put internet sales at around 20 percent of total sales by 2030.

“Here is where it gets murky,” according to Price Edwards. “The second largest e-commerce retailer is WalMart, much of which is picked up at their stores. Approximately half of internet sales are to retailers who have brickand-mortar stores.

“Retailers are getting very creative at using their stores both to fulfill internet orders and be distribution centers. Interactive kiosks in stores are becoming more commonplace.”

Several, if not all, of the Walmart Supercenters here have internet ordering and special pickup lanes where you pull up and someone will tote your groceries to your car.

Price Edwards said Wal-Mart also is experimenting with small stores that are basically pickup stations for internet orders, including groceries, filled at a nearby Supercenter.

Did I see one of those somewhere in the metro area? I did or I dreamed it, but late Friday I couldn’t find out. If you know of one, let me know.

Wait. “Including groceries”?

I’ve always said I never minded living in a neighborhood next to a Walmart Supercenter because you never know when you’re going to wake up in the middle of the night needing a bottle of aspirin, some milk and a new lawn mower. Maybe before long, they’ll have that stuff waiting for me. Shazam! “The fact is that brick and mortar and the internet are integrating in ways we wouldn’t have imagined,” Price Edwards said. “Expect this to continue. Brick and mortar isn’t dying; it is organically changing in response to changing consumer tastes and buying preferences just like it always has.”

Just imagine. If the internet ever made it to Hooterville, Sam Drucker’s custom of customized customer service would have him and his little store running with the big dogs.