Walmart today announced that next time you shop for groceries at Walmart they can access your home and stack them neatly in your fridge
Designed for people who are always on the move and always out of grocery or everyday essential. Planned to to start this fall in the cities of Kansas City, Missouri, Pittsburgh and Vero Beach, Florida with no outlines of any further expansion plans. With predictions that grocery delivery will “explode” in popularity, war between the giants would have more benefits for the time and convenience for end users. Named as InHome Delivery, here’s how it works according to Walmart :
- Customers place a grocery order and then select InHome Delivery and a delivery day at checkout – we take it from there!
- Customers can then go about their days while a Walmart associate takes care of their grocery shopping for them – from food aisle to fridge.
- At the time of delivery, associates will use smart entry technology and a proprietary, wearable camera to access the customer’s home – allowing customers to control access into their homes and giving them the ability to watch the deliveries remotely.
Just like your Uber or Lyft driver or that AirBnb owner you just waved back – these associates would be trained professionals to select the freshest grocery items and organize your refrigerator. “Once we learned how to do pickup well, we knew it would unlock the ability to deliver,” CEO Doug McMillon said during an event with members of the media. “Imagine keeping homes in stock like we do stores.” At this time, the additional prices for this surface has not been announced.
Customer today have a lot of opportunities to shop and get their purchases delivered – in retail terms is known as ‘Last Mile Delivery’. A key aspect of customer experience is to ensure that the right product is at the right place at the right time – else you have an angry customer. Every eCommerce giant spends billions of dollars in the challenge of ensuring delivery to your home is done correctly. Guess, Walmart took the challenge to the next level with the promise of delivery to the fridge.
As they drive efficiency of scale , Walmart would be able to use the same system to collect returns from customers as it goes back to the same warehouse.
Going forward I would be shopping at Walmart because they promise to select the freshest groceries and neatly stack my fridge – things I struggle with everyday. How about you?