Curbside Pick up

With all that is happening this year curbside pick up has become a common offering at many stores.

We tried it a while ago.

Go to the stores website and find what you want.

In this case it was dog food and softener salt, on sale to boot.

Place order and pay with card and they e-mail us a receipt.

Within a hour we got a call saying order was ready for pick up.

Pull up in front of store and phone them from cell phone.

They bring out your order, check your receipt and load it into the truck for you.

It's normally impossible to find a cart with wheels good enough to handle a half dozen 40 lb bags of dog food and 4 bags of salt on a smooth floor let alone trying to push it across an ice covered parking lot.

For things like this it would be nice to see them continue this service once things are back to normal.

Did you ever wonder how many old ladies and men got hit by the people pulling you order. Some pickers act
like they are getting paid by the number of items they pull. LOL

We wondered here too how long they will continue these services. My wife thinks she won't go back to actually picking out her own groceries anymore. She like sitting in her
chair and placing an online order for them. Gets a message when to come pick them up and works out pretty good.

We haven’t done that yet. Their is a service around here that
will shop for you. You send them your list. They shop and
deliver it to your home. A friend of my wife shopped and
delivered as a part time job for a while. I guess it paid decent,
but a lot of extra wear and tear on her vehicle as well as using
her own gas. She decided it wasn’t worth it in the end.

Maybe they are.

If it proves to be profitable for the stores, they will continue the service. It's that simple.

Most likely they will add/increase charges for the service.

While this service may be good for now, I sure don't want somebody picking out my produce for me. At this stage of
the game, they are probably told to pick the nicest looking head of lettuce or the best looking carrots, but will
it last? As with anything, if there is a dented can or box on the shelf, it will usually stay there wile the
undamaged cans or boxes are taken off the shelf by shoppers.

How long will it be until the stores start instructing their pickers to grab some of the more marginal packages or
produce? The smaller stalk of celery, the smaller head of lettuce, or the package of carrots with the broken ones
in it. Once you are hooked, they can slip in some "seconds" of products.

(quoted from post at 10:01:47 12/29/20) We haven t done that yet. Their is a service around here that
will shop for you. You send them your list. They shop and
deliver it to your home. A friend of my wife shopped and
delivered as a part time job for a while. I guess it paid decent,
but a lot of extra wear and tear on her vehicle as well as using
her own gas. She decided it wasn t worth it in the end.

Click to expand...

Only one grocery store around here that I am aware of that offers the curbside pick up.

We have used them a few times, they charge you $5 for the service which is nothing when you are ordering a large quantity
(we typically only go to town 1 hour away about once a month).

You can look through their online flyer for sales but otherwise you do need to keep track of what you need to order.

In the past we would normally just go up and down each isle and get what we need when we see it.

I doubt they will continue the service.
They might offer it for a fee, but it will not be for free.

A good percentage of income comes from spontaneous purchases of stuff that piques your desire.
To do that, they want you in the store. That is why stores are usually laid out with staples all the way to the back.

You really think the 'powers that be' will let things get back to 'normal'?

Couldn’t help recalling , “ In the year 2525 .... some machine be doing it for you”.

Some retailers already pick and box online orders directly from their storage rooms, they fill online orders cheaper than their in-store sales. They don't need to pay someone to put product on retail shelves, or pay cashiers at the checkout lines. I suspect that most retailers will keep curbside pickup and also drop shipping directly to customers as permanent parts of their business.

We picked up an order of groceries for my daughter last week while she was sick, it worked the same way we called when we got there and they brought the order out to us.

As one of those "picker people", I can the
large grocery store chain I work for
doesn't have rules about picking
seconds/damaged goods. Every picker is
different, but I pick as if I was picking
my groceries. Ugly stuff gets tossed out
or left behind. I had the groceries the
same way. Can't say it's the same for all
pickers though...

Pay is hourly, whether I pick 100 or 20.

It seems to work well. We have a $5 charge
per order which is nothing on a big order.
I think there are as many small orders as
big orders. I know we are committed for
the long term due to all the
infrastructure we have put in place. Not
to mention my store manager came up with
the idea about 2.5 years ago. He's
somewhat passionate about it for some
reason. It does have its short comings,
but in sure they will be worked out over
time. Our biggest problem is lack of
storage room since every square foot in a
grocery store is already called for.

I can see the day that will be the only way to shop.

Think of the problems that would be solved by not allowing customers in the store.

No more shoplifting would be the biggest plus. No culled through produce or meat that didn't sell.

No lawsuits from falls. or some nutcase shooting up the store.

No fancy displays to maintain, it would become an automated warehouse with driverless robots filling orders.

No parking lot to maintain or have to satisfy the city there is enough parking, just drive through lanes, no getting out of the car allowed.

No cashiers to pay or honest ones to find.

Minimal customer contact.

I hate to see it that way, but the way society is going, it's inevitable to happen.

Take it to the next level, the government will select for you, everything will already be in place, everyone gets the same portion. Sounds ridiculous, but wait and see!!!

Seems to me whole lot of guys on here are always
longing for the good old days. Well in the good old
days, the customer stood at the counter and passed
the store keeper or clerk a list of goods they
wanted, and didn’t get to roam around through the
store keepers supplies. The clerk brought the goods
to the counter. You paid , while they wrapped your
purchases in brown paper off a huge roll, and tied it
with a string that hung on another Hugh roll hanging
from the ceiling. This walking through the store
selecting your own goods is really only a new idea
from the post WW 2 era . Just a modern way of re
inventing the past.

That would work fine for me ;and my wife couldn’t
go in for 1 item and come out with 3 bags of stuff .

Actually Kroger/Fred Meyer was doing this before the shut down, my daughter used it all the time.

I'll take the "devil's advocate" position here.

Culled over produce and meats that did not sell? Those products should not have been in the store to start with. Stopping shoplifting? Ever hear of embezzling? If there is a way to steal, there is already a crook trying it.

No cashiers to pay? Well, instead, you have to pay delivery personnel and financial personnel to take in and process payments whether it is at the point of sale or over the internet.

No lawsuits? Falls in stores are exceedingly rare as to be insignificant in terms of eliminating people in the store. Besides, insurance pays for that liability.

How about those displays? They are there to guide you towards the display's brand of cookies or chips rather than their competitor's brand. They SELL things that might otherwise not be sold. If they didn't, they would have been discontinued long ago. They also serve to remind you of things that you might have forgotten to put on your list. They also tempt you to buy things that you might not have even considered otherwise.

And, as to some nutcase shooting up the store, just how often does that happen? If a nutcase really wants to do something evil, they WILL find a way. As an example, I point you to the federal building in Oklahoma and the nut case that parked a truck full of explosives out in front and killed 168 people. Or how about the guy in Nashville the other day? Keeping them out of the store or building apparently had minimal effectiveness.

Stores have become what they are because that is what the public asked for. How long do you think that you might have waited in line for that pound of coffee, pound of sugar, and sack of flour given today's population? An automated warehouse might work for boxed dinners and canned vegetables, For meats and produce, not so good.

Also, not for one minute should you think that this is going to be free. Something like the earlier discussion about shop rates will happen here as well. They ain't gonna do it for free!

(quoted from post at 13:01:54 12/29/20) Actually Kroger/Fred Meyer was doing this before the shut down, my daughter used it all the time.

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almart's been offering this service for quite a while too. My son uses it all the time. If you order something that's out of stock, they will make substitutions to give you the next higher priced item for the lower price.

Walmart will ship a lot of groceries like canned and dry goods and set them on your front porch no shipping charge if the order is $35 or more.No way my wife is going to let anyone else pick out the meat and vegetables she buys.

My daughter uses this service from Walmart at least once a week. Places her order during the day and picks it up on the way home from work.

I live near the same store so never use it. what I have noticed is the congestion in the store from this and reduced hours. Sounds backwards but it used to be a 24 hour store so all stocking was in the 10pm-6am time frame. Since they reduced the open hours to 6am-10pm all that is done during the day hours.

So, we have big stocking carts in the aisles all day and smaller carts stacked with smaller blue bins used to gather individual orders and 2-3 people working. Many times I've been unable to make it down an aisle on the first attempt, go to another aisle and try later.

It seems to me that the labor costs of the service must exceed the incremental revenue. And, I have to believe that sales per order would be lower than an in person shopper. Who doesn't pick up something not on their list on most trips to the store??

It will probably remain an offering, post virus, but with a substantial fee attached. Or maybe an annual membership like the online offerings.

The Hy Vee grocery chain(out of Iowa)has coex refrigerated units on the parking lot. Order and stop
out there to load up.

Wife has been ordering online and doing the drive up thing with the local HyVee. I would go inside and pick up any perishable items you may need, like milk or eggs, yourself. Or be prepared to get stuff that is about to go out of date.

Ask me how I know this.

We have been using curbside pickup with Target, Walmart, and Home Depot, they all do a good job of it. With that and Amazon rarely go in a
store.

Been ordering our big grocery stuff on-line since the pandemic started. Kind of like my wife's family grocery in the 1940's. Delivery by the store,
monthly charge account. What goes around comes around.

3 stories, First back when dad was in the Army Air Core, mom worked uptown. Walked to and back. She would stop at " Russell's Trading Post, give them the order and walk home, they would deliver the order soon after she would get home( about 1 mile walk).
#2 when in High school a classmate worked at Russell's and part of his job was delivering orders, one was my home bound Grandmother.
#3 My late sister would order from Walmart and get delivery the next day on her front porch. She was home bound for several years. RIP Norma!!

My brother was an art professor at a collage in Virginia for 30+ years. When the virus started and they had to go online teaching, he quit. Said you just can't teach art online. Got a job at the local Home
Depot as a "picker" Says he loves his job and the customers are all friendly and grateful. Said it was getting where he hated going to teach at the school where all the kids are brats and feel entitled.
He's been a bachelor all his life and saved every penny he ever made so the cut in pay doesn't matter to him. He didn't take the picker job because he needed the money, he took it so he would have a reason to
get up in the morning.

We had the corner grocery also, lots of pay day settling up as most folks were blue collar working the many industrial plants on the Houston Ship Channel. I remember mom getting home deliveries at one time in my growing up. Very dedicated Mr. Covington and wife.