Walmart will start making groceries at home buyers

BENTONVILLE, Arkansas – Walmart will start making groceries at home buyers. Right to their kitchen refrigerators.

Beginning this fall, nearly one million people from three cities – Kansas City, Missouri, Pittsburgh and Vero Beach, Florida – will have access to Walmart's new home delivery option, the retailer announced Friday. of its annual meeting of shareholders in Bentonville, Arkansas. The company said it would "learn and adapt the option" across the United States from there, without specifically specifying any other plans for expansion.

The Walmart Home Delivery Project is led by Bart Stein. A former Google, Stein joined Walmart a little over a year ago after founding Wim, a hardware company that he hoped to become the so-called Keurig of frozen yogurt, to run the company. Franklin project. Franklin is the second company to come from the Walmart Technology Incubator, Store No. 8. In stealth mode, Stein tests home delivery with Walmart in New Jersey.

The announcement comes as Walmart continues to argue with Amazon in a fierce war to offer customers delivery of products such as groceries, as quickly as possible. The two companies have recently announced their intention to deliver the next day, with Walmart promising to reach about 75% of US consumers with this faster shipping option by the end of 2019. In the meantime, Amazon has launched several devices. Key "allowing deliveries to homes of customers, cars and garages.

The stake to be won in online grocery shopping remains high as the market grows. Some predicted that grocery delivery would "explode" in popularity in the United States.

According to Coresight Research, about 36.8% of US consumers have purchased groceries online in the last 12 months, compared to 23.1% in 2018, according to Coresight Research estimates. According to Coresight, only 2.2% of US food and beverage sales were made online last year. And that should reach about 2.7% this year.

The proportion of people buying groceries online, especially from Walmart, has increased from 25.5% in 2018 to 37.4% this year, a notable leap, said Coresight, who polled 1,888 American adults last April.

Here's how Walmart's new home delivery will work:

• Customers wishing to use the service must have an intelligent lock installed by Walmart outside their home or garage.
• They can then place a grocery order on Walmart.com or the Walmart mobile app, selecting "Home Delivery", as well as a specific delivery day, at the time of payment.
• They can choose to have their orders delivered directly to the kitchen or garage.
• A Walmart employee will then be responsible for shopping.
• At the scheduled time of delivery, the assigned Walmart employee will use a portable and portable camera and enter a one-time code on a smart lock to access the customer's home.
• This allows the customer to control the worker's access to his home and offers the opportunity to view the delivery remotely.

"Once we learned how to do the pickup well, we knew it would free up the ability to deliver," Executive Director Doug McMillon said at an event with media representatives. "Imagine that you keep houses in stock as in stores."

Walmart does not specify the additional price of the home delivery service for buyers until this fall, when it is launched.

The company said the workers responsible for these deliveries would follow a "comprehensive training program that would prepare them to enter their customers with the same care and respect as those with whom they would treat the homes of their friends or family" . He said these people must be with Walmart for at least a year, they will be verified by the company and must have a W-2 form on file.

Later this year, it should also start accepting returns in this way, allowing customers to simply leave an item on the counter for return. And then, one of Walmart's home delivery partners will take care of the rest.

"There will be early adopters and then word of mouth will spread," said Marc Lore, Walmart's e-commerce manager in the United States, about home delivery. "It's like Airbnb."

"The perceived value is incredibly high," says Lore, because home delivery aims to prevent users from saving time during the organization of the refrigerator.

And for Walmart, "you may think it's a lot more expensive … the time to get [groceries] in the fridge, "he said in an interview. But we can group the deliveries. "And so," the real cost of delivery is much cheaper, [and] it offsets the timing to go into the house and the fridge, "he explained.

Walmart will be able to do this at a "very attractive cost," he said, hinting that the retailer would be able to deliver general merchandise home without a box. And not only would it be an environmentally friendly move, but it could also save Walmart tremendously, Lore said.

In 2017, Walmart announced a small test in the Silicon Valley area with smart lock manufacturer August Home, where it delivered packaging to customers and stored provisions in refrigerators. But this has collapsed. Stein said the deployment of home delivery this fall, using Walmart technology, is a "commercialization" of these efforts.