We have nearby groceries (less than 15 minutes away) that have been doing grocery delivery for at least a dozen years now. You order online, and they deliver to your door. But oddly enough, they don’t do store pickup. I can’t figure that out.
The reason it’s on my mind is that their delivery areas are small, and don’t seem to be growing. Like I said, I’m less than 15 minutes away, but that’s outside their delivery range. Store pickup would be a satisfactory alternative, but it’s not an option, and damned if I can understand why.
After all, what does delivery involve? Someone orders online, they assemble the order, and then they deliver it.
What does store pickup involve? Someone orders online, they assemble the order, and they set it aside.
If they can deliver, store pickup is the same as delivery, minus the actual delivery.
So what am I missing here? I really am puzzled by why they’d deliver but not do store pickup. Is there a reason, other than inertia? I’ve got no clue here.
And the manpower to do the “shopping”. I expect far more people would opt for pickup rather than delivery. Delivery, you have to be home. Pickup, you could call from work and the store has to hold the order until you arrive.
Someone has to do the shopping, and shopping for delivery would not be more efficient than shopping for pickup unless they have a dedicated delivery warehouse.
I suspect it is the cost for the storage space and extra refrigeration installation. You’d probably have to expand the “customer service” area and have them handle pickups because at least initially enough people would not be picking stuff up to have 1 dedicated cashier for them. Plus add in refrigeration space in case they do not pick up on time.
Whereas for delivery, you could probably just ship the stuff out the back delivery gate once you’ve picked them up (most likely from the front, because then you’d have to make sure there is enough inventory both in the back and in the front, and make sure it is optimized for shopping as well.)
I agree that I would choose pickup over both delivery and in person shopping, but I think stores would need to invest to make this a viable option for groceries.
I’m betting the problem is the same as why many restaurants don’t do reservations anymore- no shows. With delivery, the person will typically be home to get the items - after all, often the reason they’re getting delivery is they don’t want to go anywhere. With store pick-up, people likely blow them off if anything - no matter how trivial - comes up, as the store is the one inconvenienced, not them.
You have to be home for delivery? Not having this option available to me, I just assumed delivery customers would be given an insulated box that the delivery guy would put the groceries in, whether the customer was home or not.
If that’s not the case, I can see why pickup would be far preferable. But if it is the case, ISTM that delivery wins easily, and that pickup orders could easily share storage space with delivery orders waiting to go out.
Any delivery customers here to tell us what the story is?
I can’t figure it out either, but I do know my store has tried grocery pick up several times in multiple states and it just doesn’t seem to be cost-effective.
One problem is late arrivals - the store would need to keep cold items cold and hot items hot until the buyer arrives. How long to hold an order before reshelving it?
With delivery, the items are purchased and then taken to their destination in a relatively short time frame. Which may often be a shorter time frame than someone showing up late for a pick up.
Our store has grocery delivery, but it’s outsourced to a company called Shipt - we don’t use actual store personnel to handle that. Shipt is sort of like Uber for groceries, using a pool of independent contractors to do the work.
My store just implemented pickup (not delivery) and they literally rearranged the entire store in order to do it.
They took a little 30x30 enclave at the front of the store that was the soap/shampoo/cosmetics section and put the pickup section there. Lucky for them that section used to be the video rental section so there is a separate door. They had to outfit the space with coolers and freezers and shelves on which to store the pickup bins. And of course move all the inventory that had been there to other places in the store (most notably they lost a bunch of floor space for beer).
It was a big undertaking. And like I said they luckily had the curbside door already. If you don’t have the space and don’t have the door, you really can’t do pickup. Like someone else said, the logistics of delivery are different - you can just pack stuff up and take it out the back door.
There’s also the issue of parking. If customers could come to the business to pick up their purchases, you have to have parking space available for them. If you just do deliveries all you need is one or two parking spaces for your vehicles.
Restaurants which do pickup have a few spaces near the front door, since the time the customer will be there is short, so I doubt that this is a big problem.
I’ll add in that if there’s a delivery charge, but of that money is to pay the person to pick the items. As a customer you’d have to be willing to pay a few dollars for an employee to pull your order. Keeping in mind the business will also lose out on impulse buys you won’t make if you’re just running in and grabbing your order.
We have that issue at my store from time to time. For example, someone wants to stop in at 3:00 for 5# of hot turkey and gravy. At 3:00 it’s at the proper temperature and ready to go out the door. At 4:00 it’s dried out or even starting to burn since it’s still in a big oven trying to maintain the temp. Alternatively, it’s ready at 3, but at 3:30 we pull out out and when they show up an hour later it’s getting too cold.
In fact, we try to send these thing out the door cold, partially for this reason.
Delivery services are usually a function of the distribution warehouse, not the local retailer. Space is cheaper there, so putting together a packing space and designating a bay for the smaller trucks is not as big a deal. And timing is controlled by your own workers, with food well packed to survive any delays.
Making space for that in a retail location is seriously expensive. And if you have traffic like my area, the timing for pick-ups will never be close to exact.
Oddly enough, around here we have pick up as an option, and not delivery. I’ll take pick up over shopping on my own any day. It works really well. The few times I’ve been in the store since it’s started I’ve seen several shoppers for the service, so it seems to be very popular here (NW Oregon).
I don’t know what its like in other places, but the two supermarket chains who offer home delivery here outsource that service. In other words, someone who isn’t an actual store employee does all the shopping and then delivers it to the customer. The store doesn’t have to do anything.
In London supermarkets that do delivery often do put the stuff together in a warehouse rather than a shop - I’m certain of this because the range is actually bigger online than it is in the shop. Few of the supermarkets would have enough parking spaces for customers doing pick-ups. Mind you, few of the customers have cars anyway, so they’d always choose delivery over pick-up. I’m not sure about outside London where they have more of the enormous supermarkets with lots of storage and lots of parking, but you never see the delivery vans there so I suspect a warehouse is used at least sometimes there too.
Putting the delivery shopping together in a warehouse has the advantage that you don’t get in the way of customers shopping in person and can just zip around. The goods would all be stacked in sensible crates on shelves, not arranged for displays to attract customers or anything like that, so they’d take up less space.
You do have to be home for the delivery - unless it was a particularly small order there’d be no way you could fit it in an insulated box. They all deliver till late in the evening (some til midnight) within a one or two hour slot, so it’s not exactly difficult. Unless you’re never home for two hours in a row it’s waaaay more convenient than pick-up.
Tru dat, but out here in the 'burbs, grocery stores have huge parking lots. It’s not a problem. In fact, it would be even less of one than parking for the regular clientele, since those parking spaces for pickup would turn over every 5-10 minutes, rather than the 15-45 minutes people are in the store when doing their shopping the normal way.
In cities that are sufficiently dense that off-street parking for retail is limited or nonexistent, I’d assume getting groceries delivered wouldn’t be a problem in the first place.
That’s clearly not what’s happening around here. You can get delivery in the same zip code as the store. But a few miles away, you can’t.
If delivery was being run out of a warehouse in the boonies, then the delivery range would have to be large for it to be worth doing at all, because probably not that many of your customers live near your warehouse. And the situation I described in the OP wouldn’t be happening.
OK, so you have an area in the back of the store (by the loading dock, probably) where employees set the delivery orders while they’re waiting for the next delivery car or truck to pick them up and deliver them. ISTM that pick-up orders could sit there too, and when the customer comes in, an employee goes to the back of the store, finds the right order, and brings it to the front. The real issue would be whether the pickup orders would add modestly to the use of that space, or whether the pickup orders would overwhelm it.
Refrigerated storage space and if there are frozen goods in the order they would have to be stored elsewhere and then reassembled when the customer shows up.
We have Peapod here, affiliated with a large grocery chain. I think the trick is that Peapod deliveries come from a large warehouse that serves the same territory as 10 or 20 of the supermarkets that advertise delivery via Peapod.
That’s exactly how it operates. I’m also in a Peapod-heavy area.
We have a smaller regional chain that’s been delivering for ages now. They probably never considered pickup because 1) their stores are on the smaller side, and 2) their central warehouse is not convenient to a good portion of their clientele. The shopping is actually done at the individual stores where they have dedicated “delivery only” employees who do the picking, packing, and driving.
Other chains AFAIK use third-party shopping companies because they don’t wish to borne the cost of reconfiguring for pickup/delivery. For example, we ordered from Wegman’s last summer and somebody from Instacart picked and delivered our order.
My current employer doesn’t offer either. They’re in the “We WANT you to come into the store” camp.