The story below is from our May/June 2019 issue. For the full issue Subscribe today, view our FREE interactive digital edition or download our FREE iOS app!
Pickup services have changed the landscape of grocery shopping to offer more convenience and less splurging.
On a recent Sunday afternoon, Dawn Werness arrived at the Kroger at Cave Spring Corners in Roanoke County for her weekly grocery run. But she didn’t get out of her vehicle.
She pulled into a parking space and dialed the store’s number on her phone. Within minutes, a Kroger associate pushed a cart of groceries that Werness previously ordered online to her vehicle.
“I decided I didn’t want to spend time trying to find things at the grocery store,” says Werness, a Roanoke resident who works full-time and is taking graduate school courses. She began using Kroger’s Pickup service about a year ago. For the service, now available in all Roanoke Valley Kroger stores, customers make their shopping lists online at www.kroger.com, and for a $4.95 fee, pick up their groceries at the store.
Pickup service is one way that grocery shopping looks different nowadays. Werness is one of thousands of consumers nationwide who are embracing new digital methods to shop for groceries, from online shopping to home delivery and mobile applications that guide shoppers through a store. Less than five percent of U.S. households shop for groceries online, but that number is growing and could reach eight percent in the next five years, says Bill Bishop, chief architect and co-founder of Brick Meets Click, a food retailing consulting firm.
“They are catching the convenience wave, and they are exploiting it,” Bishop says. “Everything is moving that way.”
Several large grocery retailers in the Roanoke Valley, including Kroger, Walmart, Earth Fare and BJ’s Wholesale Club, have rolled out a variety of digital shopping services.
Scan, Bag, Go is one of the newer services offered at some Kroger stores, and with it, shoppers use a hand scanner to scan barcodes on grocery items as they shop. Customers can bag their own groceries and avoid checkout lines, a huge convenience for Kelley Hernandez of Roanoke, who used one of the scanners recently at Kroger at Cave Spring Corners.
“I want to get in and get out” of the store, she says.
Both Kroger and Walmart began adding online shopping and pickup in Roanoke Valley stores in 2016, while last year, Scan, Bag, Go launched in select Kroger stores, says Allison McGee, spokeswoman for the retailer’s Mid-Atlantic division based in Roanoke.
“It really is all about what our customers are asking for,” she says. “They were looking for an alternative to traditional grocery shopping.”
And where Kroger Pickup is offered, there are jobs. The grocer has 15 additional employees per store solely focused on Pickup, McGee says. Inside the Cave Spring Corners Kroger, there is a line of refrigerators and a large walk-in freezer at the back of the store where Pickup orders are stored until customers arrive at their planned pick-up time.
Sundays are the busiest pickup days at the store, drawing about 25 percent of business, says store manager Gordon Cox.
Look for these kinds of grocery shopping technologies to ramp up in the future.
Walmart plans to add grocery delivery by the end of the year to 1,600 locations, according to the retailer.
Last year, Kroger rolled out home shipping services for select non-perishable items in some markets, including the Roanoke Valley. It is experimenting with home delivery of expanded grocery items in Richmond and Hampton Roads stores, McGee says.
With these new technologies, retailers are striving to compete with Amazon’s grocery delivery division, called AmazonFresh, Bishop says.
Even so, brick and mortar grocers aren’t going away anytime soon, particularly as consumers seek them for “hyper-local” purchases, he says.
Shannon Nichols of Roanoke uses Kroger Pickup for convenience. But there is another benefit – she says she can better control her spending. Shopping for groceries online helps her keep track of her total bill.
“I find that I have fewer impulse buys,” Nichols says.
Read the rest of this story in print or in our digital guide! Plus see our sidebar on Tinnell’s Finer Foods as they tackle the delivery game. Want to meet Tinnell’s chef and get her recipe for squash fritters? See more here.
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