Walmart Wants to Put Groceries Into Your Fridge
07 June 2019 - 2:30PM
Dow Jones News
By Sarah Nassauer
Walmart Inc. is opening a new front in home-delivery services:
carting milk, eggs and other groceries and leaving them in the
fridge.
This fall, Walmart store workers in three cities will start
delivering online grocery orders directly to refrigerators in
shoppers' homes and garages, the company said.
The workers will wear body cameras clipped to their chests,
allowing customers to watch live streams of deliveries being made
while they aren't home. Workers will enter residences equipped with
smartlocks, internet-connect devices that can be controlled
remotely to unlock a door.
The service, dubbed Walmart InHome, marks the latest attempt by
retailers to adjust to changing shopping habits and solve the
last-mile delivery problem, especially for groceries.
Walmart, the country's biggest grocery seller, and other chains
already let customers pick up online orders in store parking lots
or use crowdsourced services such as DoorDash Inc. and Instacart
Inc. to fetch their orders.
Online purchases account for just 5% of the roughly $1 trillion
U.S. food and consumer product market, according to Nielsen. But it
is a fast-growing business that Walmart, Kroger Co., Amazon.com
Inc. and others are chasing.
Amazon offers a similar in-home delivery service for Prime
members in 50 cities, called Key by Amazon. But drivers don't
deliver fresh groceries, and they leave items just inside a door,
garage or the trunk of a car, not a refrigerator. Its Prime Now
service also drops orders, including fresh groceries from Whole
Foods, on doorsteps within hours.
Walmart's new service will initially be offered in Kansas City,
Mo.; Pittsburgh; and Vero Beach, Fla. Pricing will be announced in
the fall, executives said. Walmart tested an in-home
grocery-delivery service two years ago with a smartlock startup
called August Home, but the trial ended last year, a spokeswoman
said.
Walmart workers will need to be with the company for at least a
year to make deliveries, said Bart Stein, who joined Walmart last
year to test the concept after the retail behemoth purchased his
now-defunct startup that aimed to sell a countertop frozen-yogurt
machine.
Walmart tested the service in New Jersey for six months, said
Mr. Stein. In tests, using Walmart workers to make deliveries while
fitted with live cameras alleviated consumers' trust concerns, he
said. Walmart also added short biographical profiles of its
delivery workers to the pilot service's consumer app, which helped
humanize them, Mr. Stein said: "Customers didn't know who was
coming into their homes, so we changed it."
Not everyone embraces the concept at first, but just as people
have gradually accepted renting out rooms in their homes through
services like Airbnb Inc., "people are very quickly comfortable
with it," said Marc Lore, head of Walmart's U.S. e-commerce
business.
Eventually, delivery workers will also pick up products that
need to be returned to Walmart, executives said.
Walmart didn't say which smartlock the new service would require
consumers to obtain, but the technology would be sold by Walmart,
the spokeswoman said.
The Bentonville, Ark., retailer is working to grab market share
in online grocery shopping to maintain its place as the country's
largest grocer. By the end of this fiscal year, Walmart plans to
offer online grocery pickup from over 3,000 store parking lots and
1,600 stores that offer grocery delivery, mostly by joining with
crowdsourced delivery firms.
Write to Sarah Nassauer at sarah.nassauer@wsj.com
(END) Dow Jones Newswires
June 07, 2019 00:15 ET (04:15 GMT)
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