Have you ever used one of those "shop online, pick up at the store" services, things like Clicklist and Instacart?
My wife recently started using one of those at a local Fred Myers and she is a bit hooked. I had always thought those services sounded like expensive groceries for lazy people but my wife is cheap and industrious so I had to learn more.
What I saw has convinced me that this is the grocery shopping of the future.
Oh, and Amazon is probably going to dominate this too.
First off, if you have never used one of these things here is how they work.
You shop for your groceries online, just like you do for anything else, fill your shopping cart and check out. Then you schedule when you are going to be at the store to pick it up, pull up, give them your order number, and people come load your car.
You might think that this sounds like an interesting niche service for grocery stores to have so they can better serve lazy people. But it is so much more.
It is the future of grocery shopping.
How so?
Imagine this:
You log into Amazon and turn on Prime Pantry and filter for "local availability" and then you start sifting through all the different options. But this isn't like the options you can get on Clicklist for Fred Myers, no this is 3X to 5X more options, all of which are optimized to the tastes and preferences of your area.
Why are there so many more? Because of the Costco size, nondescript, warehouses that have begun springing up in cities all over the country. And because these warehouses are optimized for max storage and fast retrieval, not for a shopping experience, they can hold many times more than a grocery store of equal square footage. So basically you will have access to everything except for the very niche, brand new, or locally unpopular products.
Amazon is built on the "long tail", this is grocery long tail shopping.
So you put into your "pantry box" everything you want, and a bunch of things you got up-sold on, and go to check out. Then you are given the option of having your groceries delivered within 24 hours for $5 or you can pick them up...
Are you getting this?
This is huge.
This is going to transform the grocery market, make it 10X better for customers, and completely wreck the incumbent companies who don't jump on this.
So Walmart, Albersons, Safeway, Fred Myers, etc. GET ON THE BALL.
I love Amazon but I don't want them to own the entire economy.
