How Wal-Mart is hoping to change grocery shopping

Sarah Halzack
June 4
Washington Post
Bentonville, Ark. — As Sam’s Club began allowing customers to buy their groceries online and pick them up in person, the Wal-Mart-owned chain of stores noticed a frequent conundrum: Customers were having to wait too long in the warehouses to get their goods.
The culprit, they determined, was frozen foods. They couldn’t keep these items alongside the dry and packaged goods in an order, so when a customer arrived, workers would have to make their way across the sprawling store to get the frozen items. This presented a wrinkle in achieving the goal of faster shopping trips — the central purpose of store pickups.
On Wednesday, during a presentation at its annual shareholders meeting, Wal-Mart technologists debuted a new tool that solves that problem.
After you’ve placed the order, a notification on your phone prompts you to “check in” when you’re ready to pick it up. Before you hop in your car to retrieve your order at Sam’s Club, you go to that check-in screen and let the store know how long it will take for you to get there. Workers will then assemble those frozen items with the rest of your order so it is ready just in time for your arrival.
“Our focus at this point is to make sure we nail down the customer experience, and soon enough, we’ll start rolling it out to further clubs,” said Eytan Daniyalzade, a leader on Wal-Mart’s mobile innovation team.
This new feature makes clear that Wal-Mart is doubling down on its efforts to get customers to rethink the way they shop for groceries, perhaps the most mundane and essential of retail purchases. While shoppers have already moved in droves to buy clothes, electronics and books online, they have stubbornly clung to the old-school way of filling their pantries and refrigerators. In 2014, researchers with IBIS World estimated that online grocery sales were a paltry 1.9 percent of total grocery sales.
With the presentations Wednesday, it was evident that Wal-Mart’s plan of attack for winning your grocery dollars in the digital era will be to blend the in-store and online experience, to make it easy for shoppers to bounce easily from one channel to the other.
In addition to the Sam’s Club mobile check-in feature, the company showed off a pilot program it calls “intelligent click and collect.” This is currently being tested at Asda, a British supermarket chain owned by Wal-Mart. At some gas stations along a freeway in Britain, they have set up small facilities where customers can retrieve their online grocery order from a temperature-controlled locker. When the order has been packed, the shopper gets an e-mail containing a QR code for their specific order. When they arrive at the facility, they pull up the QR code on their phone, wave it in front of a kiosk, and the locker containing their order opens. The goal is for the customer to be in and out in 60 seconds or less.
The retailer also showed its new store mapping feature, which allows shoppers to search for a product on the Wal-Mart app and then, in one click, get a map of where to find that item in their nearest Wal-Mart store. The feature is an adaptation for a widespread shopping behavior: People are frequently researching their purchases online even if they ultimately make them in physical stores. This function should make it easier for shoppers to go from researching on their phones to filling up their carts in the store.
Wal-Mart will have plenty of competition as it aims to be your go-to destination for groceries. In addition to traditional supermarkets, Wal-Mart’s chief rival, Target, has said it plans to make a new play for your grocery dollars by revamping its stores to feature more fresh and healthy foods. Meanwhile, online giants Google and Amazon are experimenting with grocery delivery services, as are start-ups, such as Postmates and Instacart.