Walmart Automates Grocery Pickup Process
Going grocery shopping isn’t exactly a fun task, what with wandering up and down aisles, piling up items in a cart just to unpile those items to put into bags later. Leave aside the ever-increasing prices, the whole practice is a little on the dull and monotonous side.
That’s a point Walmart is out to change with a new automated kiosk that allows for rapid pickup of groceries that’s almost, but not quite, as good as delivery.
The new automated kiosks—currently only available in Oklahoma City—allow users to shop for groceries online, pointing and clicking as desired, and then the mass is assembled and stored at the kiosk in question.
With a pickup code, the kiosk then automatically fetches the order from internal bin-based storage, and then the order—bagged and ready—can go into your car for the ride home.
Those using the kiosks will need to spend at least $30 for the total order—not hard for even a week’s worth of groceries—and will only be able to place said orders during store hours. There are no fees associated with this, and given that many Walmarts are open around the clock, this isn’t the problem some might expect it to be.
Walmart hasn’t just started experimenting with this kind of system; reports suggest that several vending machine-style “Pickup Towers” are in place throughout the United States, and kiosk systems are also in play in the United Kingdom as well.
Walmart has plenty of work to do to catch up to Amazon, though; Amazon recently rolled out a drive-through grocery store, and if the drone-based delivery systems start firing up in earnest we may well be ordering whatever we have a hankering for at any particular time on the spot.
That’s going to drop the need for big-box style grocery substantially, though thanks to adverse weather conditions and the like we may well still see people with an interest in stocking up. Throw in things like apps that serve as portable checkout lanes and the landscape only changes further.
Still, it’s clear the landscape is changing as far as grocery retail goes, and it may not be too long before the grocery store as we know it today just isn’t the same thing any more.