Grocery online ordering, at-store pickup service increasing in popularity
Posted: Saturday, July 30, 2016 10:30 pm
For the convenience, being able to order groceries online and having them ready for pickup when you get to the supermarket, cannot be beat.
No hunting for a parking space. No walking up and down aisles looking for that odd item that’s not where you expected it to be. No standing in the checkout line.
Grocery chains, in this ever-so-competitive grocery marketplace, are trying to provide new and more convenient ways to attract and retain shoppers.
What could be more convenient than having the store do most of the legwork for you at a minimal cost or no cost?
Kroger and Walmart, two of the biggest players in the grocery business, have jumped into the grocery e-commerce game big-time, offering online grocery ordering with at-store pickup in markets across the country including the Richmond region.
Kroger locally started offering its ClickList service on a limited basis in March, and the service is now available at seven of the 18 area Kroger stores. Plans are to expand to four more stores by the end of the year.
Plans also call to add the service at selected Kroger stores in the Charlottesville, Roanoke and Hampton Roads markets.
Walmart’s online ordering service, called Walmart Grocery, rolled out locally in April and is available at four of the chain’s 20 Walmart Supercenter or Walmart Neighborhood Market locations in the area. Walmart Grocery pickup also is offered at 10 stores in Hampton Roads.
Customers such as Barbara Hickerson like the drive-up convenience. Hickerson said she has used the Kroger ClickList grocery every week since it became available in June at the Kroger store at 11895 W. Broad St. in western Henrico County.
“All I do is call the phone number, pop my trunk, and they put my order in my car,” she said last week as she waited in her car at a designated order pickup area at the side of the Kroger store, which is across from the Short Pump Town Center mall.
“It makes grocery shopping so much easier,” said Hickerson, who said she typically buys groceries at Kroger and Trader Joe’s.
“Never once have they gotten it wrong,” she said, referring to her Kroger ClickList orders. “I won’t shop anywhere else.”
The online ordering process is relatively straightforward. Go to the grocery’s website or, if available, use the store’s mobile app.
The Kroger and Walmart sites show a shopping cart and running total as you add items.
Kroger’s site shows recent purchases tied to the customer’s loyalty card. Both allow shopping by category (such as fruits and vegetables or dairy) or let customers do a simple search for an item by typing in a word. Customers can shop online for tens of thousands of items.
Kroger charges $4.95 per order but no dollar minimum order is required. Walmart does not charge a fee, but requires a $30 minimum order.
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Online grocery ordering currently accounts for a fraction — estimated to be 3 to 6 percent — of the estimated $675 billion U.S. grocery sales market.
But the trend is up, driven in part by tech-savvy millennials who are accustomed to using technology to simplify everything from finding a date for Saturday night to looking for a job to arranging a ride to the airport.
A January report from Morgan Stanley Research, which looked at the global reach of online grocery shopping, estimated the percentage of online shoppers buying groceries to go from 21 percent in 2015 to 34 percent in 2016.
An April 2015 Nielsen Co. report on the future of the grocery business in 60 countries noted that 25 percent of survey respondents were already ordering grocery products online for home delivery, with more than half willing to use such services.
There are multiple configurations of online grocery ordering — order online, with delivery to the door; order online, pick up at the “curb;” and order online and pick up inside the store.
Kroger built its ClickList system internally, said George Anderson, e-commerce manager for Kroger’s 120-store Mid-Atlantic division.
The chain learned a lot about the online ordering with at-store pickup after acquiring the Harris Teeter grocery chain in January 2014. Harris Teeter was an early adopter of the service, and it now offers its Express Lane service at many of its 230 stores, including those in Virginia.
The Kroger Marketplace store at 10800 Iron Bridge Road in Chesterfield County was the chain’s first location in Virginia and its first on the East Coast to offer the service.
“What we hear from our customers is that normally it takes two hours a week for what I call a ‘good’ grocery shop (in the store),” Anderson said. “They are saying now between ordering online and pickup, it’s saving them about an hour and a half a week.”
Ja’Qale Thomas, an assistant manager and online grocery assistant at the Walmart Supercenter at 2410 Sheila Lane in South Richmond, hears similar comments from customers there.
“We get a lot of repeat customers,” he said. “They comment that it really does help save them a lot of time. We get a lot of mothers. We get a lot of businesspeople getting off work. We get a lot of older people and people with disabilities.”
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But is online ordering and at-store pickup service going to take off as some analysts predict?
With Wegmans operating in the market and Publix coming to the Richmond area — both chains known for having superior customer service — will convenience be able to trump the in-store experience and attention to detail the two retailers are known for?
Wegmans, for instance, does not like its customers waiting to check out and will open a new register to reduce waiting. In addition, if a customer can’t find an item, Wegmans employees are supposed to lead the shopper to the item.
Then again, it may be a moot issue. Wegmans is testing online ordering and at-store pickup in some markets, and Publix offers such a service at some of its stores in other states.
“In three of our stores — Pittsford, N.Y., Bridgewater, N.J., and Cherry Hill, N.J. — we offer our personal shopping service: grocery ordering online with curbside pickup at the store. We hope to expand personal shopping to more stores in the future, but we haven’t identified which stores and don’t have a timetable,” said Jo Natale, vice president of media relations of Rochester, N.Y.-based Wegmans Food Markets.
At Florida-based Publix, spokeswoman Kim Reynolds said, “While we haven’t yet determined all of the services that will be offered in our Virginia stores, we are always evaluating this type of service and considering customer feedback. At this time, we are piloting this service in a handful of stores in an existing market area in collaboration with InstaCart.”
Kroger, Walmart and other chains have their work cut out for them as behemoth online retailer Amazon.com delves deeper into the online grocery business.
Amazon.com carries hundreds of food products — which you can have delivered to your door.
With Amazon Prime Pantry, customers can fill a box with items and pay $5.99 per box for the delivery charge. As you add items to an online grocery cart, a calculator tells you what percentage of the box is filled and what percentage of the box an item takes up.
The e-commerce giant is testing its AmazonFresh concept in some markets — not here — which would make items like meat and dairy available for home delivery.
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Neither Kroger nor Walmart would provide figures on numbers of orders or number of unique customers using the services.
Kroger’s Anderson shared some general observations: Customers ordering online place big orders. They are doing their weekly shopping, so they are not just grabbing a few items.
“They are not small orders. They are very large orders. That’s pretty significant,” he said.
Demographic data show that the majority of ClickList customers have young children in the household and are two-income families, he said. About 75 percent are repeat customers, Anderson said.
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A test of the services last week met their promises.
Orders were made Tuesday afternoon and placed for Wednesday morning pickup between 9 and 10 a.m. at the Walmart Supercenter in Mechanicsville and at the Kroger Marketplace store in Hanover County.
Kroger sent an email reminder at 8:04 the morning of the scheduled pickup. A person from Walmart called at 8:18 a.m. with a reminder of the order there.
Both stores had directional signs as you drive in the parking lots showing you where to go for grocery pickup.
Both had about half a dozen numbered parking spaces set aside for order pickup, with a sign at each space instructing the customer to call a specific phone number.
At the Kroger Marketplace, two employees came out — one to load the groceries while the other processed the payment by debit or credit card and to go over the order. Two items were substituted, and one item was unavailable with no substitute. Kroger provided an itemized receipt at the car and emailed a copy of the credit card receipt.
Walmart requires payment information by debit or credit card when the ordering was placed online. One employee came out to load the groceries. The receipt was emailed.
Time from arrival to departure at both locations was eight minutes or less. It was morning — around 9 a.m. — and on a weekday, which was probably a slow time.
At home, the groceries were unpacked and sorted and scrutinized. Cold items — milk, chicken wings, frozen vegetables and deli turkey — were still cold. Produce — bagged apples, cherries and ears of corn — looked good.
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Kroger and Walmart both have teams of employees trained to go up and down the aisles with portable electronic barcode readers filling as many as six or eight orders at a time. They are called personal shoppers or pickers.
The device has a small screen that tells employees what product the customer wants. After picking the item, the employee scans it and places it into a bin.
Both stores have specified areas of the stores with freezers and refrigerators where employees sort, bag and store the orders for customers.
Walmart has a goal for its employees: to begin fulfilling about “60 picks” an hour. A pick is an item but not necessarily quantity of items. For instance, if an order includes three jars of the same tomato sauce, that is counted as one pick.
“Our top associate right now is doing about 84,” Walmart’s Thomas said.
At the Kroger store across from Short Pump Town Center, ClickList supervisor Marcus Jones singled out employee Alexandria Futrell as the quickest and most accurate picker.
“Whenever I pick an item off the shelf, I scan it and put it in, but if it’s multiples, I grab as many as I can before I put them in the tote,” said Futrell, referring to the cart with individual crates or totes.
“The handheld really tells us what goes in what tote for what order. So it’s really organized for you,” she said.
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