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Daily news and analysis about the food tech revolution

Walmart

Walmart’s Drone Delivery Pilot with Flytrex Takes off in North Carolina

Walmart announced today that it has partnered with Flytrex to start a drone delivery pilot program in Fayetville, North Carolina. The drones will deliver select groceries and household essential items.

Neither company provided more details about specific service areas or hours, but we do know that Flytrex has already been operating drone deliveries in Iceland since 2018 and more recently in North Dakota here in the U.S.

As we’ve written before about Flytrex:

The Flytrex drone is a hex-copter capable of carrying a 6.5 pound payload (enough to feed a family of four, said Bash), up to 40 m.p.h., with a range of six miles. The system is really built for suburban sprawl, and uses a tether to lower deliveries down to people when it arrives at its destination. Bash said that while a human driver can typically only make two to three deliveries an hour, a Flytrex drone operator can make up to 15.

Fytrex’s other pitch is that is has numerous safety-related redundancies that allow its drones to withstand catastrophic events like motor loss, battery loss and communication failure.

Walmart’s announcement comes just weeks after its retail rival, Amazon, won approval from the FAA for its own drone delivery program. Elsewhere in the U.S., Google Wing has been making drone deliveries in Virginia, Deuce Drone will start making grocery deliveries in Mobile, AL, and Uber had plans to do drone delivery in San Diego this summer.

But given the complexities of drone delivery (flight paths, added layers of safety in the event of a drone failure, etc.), we aren’t anywhere close to hearing a steady drone of drones overhead anytime soon. Walmart even conceded as much in its announcement today, writing, “We know that it will be some time before we see millions of packages delivered via drone. That still feels like a bit of science fiction, but we’re at a point where we’re learning more and more about the technology that is available and how we can use it to make our customers’ lives easier.”

It’s only a bit like science fiction now though.

The Food Tech Show: Walmart+ and Ghost Kitchen Robots

It may be the waning days of summer, but there’s still time to get outside for a walk and listen to podcasts and the Spoon team is here to help with our latest episode of The Food Tech Show.

This week, the team discusses the launch of the strategy behind Walmart+, Walmart’s long-rumored membership program centered around grocery and food which will now launch on September 15th.

Other stories discussed on the podcast include:

You can subscribe to the Food Tech Show on Apple Podcasts and Spotify or wherever you listen. If you’re a regular listener, we’d really appreciate a review!

You can also listen by clicking play below or downloading direct to your device.

Walmart to Launch Its Walmart+ Membership Service on September 15

Walmart today announced it will launch its own membership service, Walmart+, on September 15. The service will be available for $98/year or $12.95/month and include free same-day delivery from Walmart stores, fuel discounts, and other perks.

A Walmart+ membership gets you free, unlimited delivery “on more than 160,000 items” from Walmart stores (with a minimum order of $35), access to the company’s Scan & Go tech that lets customers skip the checkout line, and discounts on fuel. Walmart said in today’s press release that “the list of benefits will continue to grow over time.”

Walmart has been testing free delivery through its Delivery Unlimited program since last year. When Walmart+ launches across the company’s stores nationwide, current Delivery Unlimited subscribers will automatically become members of Walmart+.

Walmart+ was first revealed in February of this year in a move that immediately invited comparisons to Amazon and its Prime membership service. Speaking to TechCrunch today, Walmart said it was “not launching Walmart+ with the intent to compete with anything else.” And the service is by no means a mirror image of Prime, especially considering that Prime includes free access to streaming movies, music and more.

At least initially, Walmart+ seems to be focused more on groceries and household items (along with some toys and electronics), an area the company is already strong in. This focus on grocery makes sense given the record amounts of online grocery shopping still happening because of the pandemic. A recent survey showed that Walmart has actually overtaken Amazon as the leading retailer for online grocery shopping, and adding Walmart+ could help solidify its lead.

Walmart and Amazon have actually kind of switched places over the past week with their announcements. With today’s news, Walmart, which has a vast network of real-world stores, is announcing it’s Prime-like service. Last week, Amazon, the online retail giant, announced the opening of its first full-on real world supermarket in Woodland Hills, CA. Both moves help illustrate how important the grocery category has become for each company.

Another thing to watch with Walmart+ is how many customers will adopt the Scan & Go technology, which allows shoppers to skip the checkout line by scanning product barcodes with their phones. Walmart’s approach is more manual than that of an Amazon Go store, which uses cameras and sensors to automatically track what shoppers are buying. Will the extra scanning step inhibit adoption of Scan & Go? Also, in the pandemic era, where contactless payments are increasingly table stakes, will Walmart incentivize more people to use Scan & Go, and will customers like the system?

We’ll mark our calendars and see.

Additional reporting by Chris Albrecht.

Survey: As Online Grocery Trends Up, Walmart Leads and E-Commerce is Here to Stay

Results of a new survey from Coresight Research (registration required) released today show that as grocery e-commerce continues to trend up, thanks to the pandemic, Walmart has overtaken Amazon as the leading retailer and online grocery shopping appears to be the new normal for many consumers.

Coresight has been conducting weekly surveys of US consumers since mid-March and today’s results are from a survey done on August 19th. In this latest survey, Coresight found that 60 percent of respondent had bought groceries online in the past 12 months, up from 52 percent back in March.

Coresight also found that Walmart became the leading retailer for online grocery shoppers, surpassing Amazon. In August 56 percent of the online grocery shoppers had bought from Walmart, up from 52 percent back in March. Amazon saw a decline in Coresight’s study, with 55 percent of online grocery shoppers indicating they bought from there, down from 63 percent in March.

Now that we are six months into this pandemic it seems like people are getting habituated into buying their groceries online. Coresight’s survey found that 36 percent of online grocery shoppers “plan to retain their current online purchasing frequency one the pandemic eases or ends.”

These findings aren’t too surprising. Other research firms have shown month-over-month record numbers of online grocery shopping since the pandemic hit the U.S.. But Coresight’s surveys help add to this body of research and round out the picture of how consumers are changing habits as the pandemic continues.

What is worth studying more is the Walmart v. Amazon rivalry. All grocery retailers struggled under the sudden crush of new customers when the pandemic first hit. Amazon, which saw its grocery business triple year-over-year thanks to COVID, actually had to implement a waitlist for new delivery customers. Coresight surmised from its data that Amazon grew its sales through bigger baskets from existing customers, while Walmart may have been able to attract more customers.

Anecdotally, this fits with my own grocery experience. As delivery windows were hard to come buy during that initial e-commerce wave, Walmart, with its massive network of real-world stores was still able to fulfill my online grocery orders through curbside pickup.

And as Coresight points out, I’m not alone in finding online grocery shopping to be the new normal. Grocers have ironed out many of the early issues that plagued grocery e-commerce and with six months of shopping for groceries online now under their belt, people may have had enough time to establish new food buying habits.

Earlier this year, Coresight predicted that the online grocery sector would grow by 40 percent in 2020 to hit $38 billion in sales. I wonder if they will have to adjust that number as this new data comes in. Additionally, the grocery landscape continues to change. Not only is Amazon adding real world supermarkets to its arsenal of shopping options, but Walmart is expected to launch its new Walmart+ delivery service soon (and has since added Instacart as a grocery delivery partner), and new third-party players like Uber and DoorDash are now getting into the grocery delivery space.

Walmart, Tesco, and Other Food Brands Join the Consumer Goods Forum’s Food Waste Coalition

As the world’s food waste issue becomes more urgent, food companies up and down the supply chain are under pressure to deliver solutions that address the problem and help consumers change their behaviors in their grocery stores and homes. One such effort that surfaced this week is the Consumer Goods Forum’s Food Waste Coalition, which has a goal of “halving per capita global food loss at the retailer and consumer levels,” according to an announcement from CGF.

The Coalition, as it’s being called, includes 14 initial members, many of them major food retailers, including Walmart, Ahold Delhaize, Sainsbury, and Tesco. (See the full list of companies below.)

Through their participation in the Coalition, these companies are currently addressing three commitments:

  • To measure and report food loss data by 2021
  • To help scale up Champions 12.3’s “10x20x30” initiative, which supports UN SDG 12.3 that aims to halve global food waste by 2030
  • To address post-harvest food waste and develop new strategies to curb it

Worldwide, the food waste problem has been steadily gaining attention over the last couple years in the form of food producers and tech startups bringing potential solutions to market. There’s a good reason for this uptick in activity: Roughly 1.3 billon tons of food is wasted globally each year, totaling about $990 billion in economic losses. There are also profoundly disturbing environmental and human costs to food waste: food waste’s global carbon footprint is estimated to be 3.3 billion tons of CO2 equivalent of greenhouse gases. That’s to say nothing of food insecurity. In the U.S. alone, rescuing even 15 percent of the food we waste could feed 25 million Americans. In developed countries, the majority of food waste happens at the consumer levels, in retail or in the home.

The new Coalition is a pick of international companies that will also create regional groups to drive change at a local level. “Given the magnitude of the problem of food waste, CGF members are committed to reducing food loss in their own supply chains,” the Coalition states on its website.

The full list of initial companies includes Ahold Delhaize, Barilla, Bel Group, General Mills, Kellogg Company, Majid Al Futtaim, McCain Foods, Merck Animal Health, Metro AG, Migros Ticaret, Nestlé, Sainsbury, Tesco, and Walmart.

This isn’t CGF’s first foray into the food waste category. It has worked in the past with Champions 12.3, publishing a report in 2017 about the potential return on investment from food waste and calling for more standardized date labels on food items.

The Coalition hasn’t yet named any specific strategies around how it will tackle the food waste problem.

The good news is that there are an increasing number of innovative options for the Coalition to choose from as there are many startups are tackling food waste throughout the supply chain. Apeel’s produce-coating technology helps extend the shelf life of produce. AI-based technology like that of Afresh helps stores better manage fresh inventory, so less goes to waste. And food rescue apps like Karma help keep extra food from restaurants out of landfills.

Hopefully, this new Coalition can use some of its resources to join that effort and develop new solutions and processes that get people to not just think about but also act on their behaviors around food waste. 

Walmart Brings on Instacart for Same Day Grocery Delivery

Walmart has teamed up with Instacart to provide same day grocery delivery in four markets across California and Oklahoma, reports CNBC.

Instacart users in Los Angeles, San Francisco, San Diego and Tulsa will be able to order groceries, alcohol and more from Walmart stores for delivery in as little time as one hour.

The move is of note because this is the first time that Walmart has enlisted the help of Instacart for its main stores in the U.S. (Instacart delivers for Walmart Canada as well as Walmart-owned Sam’s Club). As Grocery Dive points out, the agreement comes just a week after Walmart reportedly delayed the launch of its Amazon Prime-like service, Walmart+, which will include same-day grocery delivery.

The timing for such a partnership is certainly right. The COVID-19 pandemic has spurred record amounts of online grocery shopping, which entails either curbside pickup or delivery. As it was deluged with demand, Instacart raised another $225 million in June and ratcheted its number of gig Shoppers (who do the picking and delivery) to 750,000 to keep up.

What’s somewhat curious about this deal is why Walmart is choosing to do it. Obviously the big reason to help fend off Amazon, which saw its grocery sales triple year-over-year, from gobbling up marketshare as it starts rolling out its own real-world grocery stores. Plus every player in the grocery retail space has bulked up its delivery options. But unlike Instacart’s other grocery store partners, Walmart is a logistics machine. I’m not sure why it would want to hand over the customer relationship to a third-party.

Perhaps this is indeed more of a stopgap to help retain and gain customers while Walmart ramps up its own delivery mechanisms. Or perhaps Walmart is finding more customers use its curbside pickup offering (a service it was pushing hard at the beginning of the year).

Regardless, the pandemic has forced all kinds of acceleration and adaptation in the grocery space, and this deal from Walmart and Instacart is just one more story that will keep going throughout the year.

Impossible Burger Now Available at Walmart

Impossible Foods announced today that its plant-based Impossible Burger is now available at nearly 2,100 Walmart stores across the U.S.

Whomever is in charge of retail operations/relations at Impossible has definitely been burning the midnight oil. Today’s announcement comes just days after Impossible announced that it was available at Trader Joe’s stores. Impossible Burger is now available at 8,000 retail outlets nationwide.

Part of what makes this news notable is just how quickly Impossible has ramped up production. In April of this year, just four months ago, Impossible Burger was only available in 1,000 retail locations. This ability to scale is a far cry from the production shortages Impossible experienced in 2019.

Walmart is the largest food retailer in the U.S., with grocery sales of $288 billion and more than 26 percent share of all groceries sold, according to FoodIndustry.com. So it was only a matter of time before Impossible hit Walmart shelves.

This has been a summer of aggressive moves by Impossible. In addition to new retail partners, the company launched its own direct-to-consumer sales channel, partnered with Starbucks and Burger King for plant-based sausage sandwiches, and made its Impossible sausage available to restaurants across the country.

Beyond Meat, Impossible’s rival, has been no slouch this summer either. The company launched another test of its plant-based chicken at KFC earlier this month, created a bulk package SKU that brought down the price of its burger, and made international expansion moves into China.

Both companies are striking while the iron is hot, as it were. Sales of plant-based meat have surged during the pandemic, with the coronavirus highlighting ethical issues around the production of animal meat. A lot is uncertain in these times, but it’s a pretty safe bet that we will be hearing even more news from both Impossible and Beyond throughout the rest of the year.

The Food Tech Show: The Story Behind Spoon Plus

We write and talk a lot about product launches here at The Spoon, but we look inward on this week’s Food Tech Show as we discuss the backstory behind Spoon Plus, our membership community we launched last week.

If you’re a blog or online content nerd, this one is for you as we talk about our previous efforts at one of Silicon Valley’s biggest tech blogs and how the world of online memberships has evolved over the past decade. We also discuss how we’d been planning on building Plus before COVID-19, but how the pandemic gave the launch a little more urgency.

If you’re a food tech nerd, we’ve got you covered too, because in this show we also talk about these stories:

As always, you can listen to The Food Tech Show on Apple Podcasts, Spotify or wherever you get your podcasts. You can also download it directly to your device or just click play below.

Be Like Walmart and Swing for the Geofences

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Prior to the pandemic, I never grocery shopped at Walmart. It was too far away and I wanted to support my local supermarket. Throughout this pandemic, however, I’ve been at Walmart every week for my curbside grocery pickups. One reasons I’m such a frequent Walmarter now is that they make the whole process of getting groceries via curbside easy. I place my order, schedule my pickup time and when my groceries are ready, they send me a notification on my phone.

Part of that notification asks me to check-in with the Walmart app to let the store know I’m on my way. As I pull into their parking lot, the app automatically recognizes that I’ve arrived, thanks to the GPS on my phone and Walmart’s geofencing technology. Once I specify my parking stall, a Walmart staffer is out with my order and bada-boom, bada-bing, in minutes my trunk is loaded, no human contact has occurred and I’m on my way back home to shelter in place for another week.

Contrast Walmart with the curbside pickup experience at my local Safeway, which is a lot closer than the Walmart but does not have geofencing in its app. When I arrive at the store, I have to call a special number to let them know I’ve arrived, they ask me what stall I’m in and then send someone with my order out. Obviously my calling a number isn’t a huge deal, but it’s one extra step, and one more thing for a human staffer at Safeway to deal with all day while dealing with all the other changes this pandemic has brought with it.

Contactless is going to be the word of 2020, especially as it relates to food delivery and curbside pickup, and geofencing is going to play an increasingly important part of that. Yesterday, Panera announced geofence-enabled curbside pickup for orders, and IBM has been touting Safe Queue, a virtual line app powered in part by geofencing that was created for Big Blue’s Call for Code Global Challenge contest.

As a technology, geofencing has actually been around for long time. But it will take on more importance as restaurants and grocers look to efficiently maximize their revenues while reducing human-to-human contact. Restaurants that must operate at reduced dine-in capacity need a robust off-premises plan, including curbside pickup, and people are still scared of going into the grocery store itself, requiring pickup options as well.

Geofencing means orders can be fulfilled more quickly because the restaurant or supermarket knows when you’ve arrived. Walmart may have huge parking lots and plenty of space for cars pickup up orders, but a lot of restaurants and independent grocers don’t. They’ll need to make the most of their physical takeout/pickup space. The faster a curbside order is handed off, the faster cars turn over in the parking lot and the more orders can be fulfilled.

There is obviously a privacy tradeoff with geofencing. Some people may not want to hand over their location data to Walmart, Panera or whomever, and that’s okay. Different strokes and all. Privacy is a constant question we come up against in this connected world, and we should definitely hold businesses accountable to being good stewards of our data.

There are lots of changes consumer facing food businesses will need to make (and re-make) in order to survive this pandemic. But if curbside pickups are part of your plan, you should fire up the geofencing now.

Woot! Founder Launches Pasta by Mail

It kinda makes sense that Matt Rutledge, the founder of Woot!, an e-commerce site known for its sense of humor, would choose noodles for a food-related project. I mean, noodles are funny, especially the way Rutledge is selling them.

Rutledge launched PastaDrop, a “pasta as a service” online pop-up that lets you buy random amounts of pasta and have it sent to friends. PastaDrop determines the quantity of noodles being shipped and hilarity ensues (again, because noodles = funny).

Spoon founder Mike Wolf reached out to Rutledge for an email interview to find out more about PastaDrop. You should read the whole exchange (it’s very entertaining), but here’s an amuse-bouche to get you started:

Wolf: Why pasta?

This is our first Pasta experience! What a product! There is a subset of variety with personal opinion. There are amazing recipes to share. It’s a comfort food. It has a long shelf life and can be transported without much risk of damage. It is quite dense and therefore efficient to ship; hundreds of servings can fit in a box. Best of all it can be funny in mass quantities! Oh, and there are pasta puns — we love puns!

Sign Up for Spoon Plus, Our New Membership Insights & Virtual Events Community

Last week we announced the launch of Spoon Plus, our new membership community that gives you exclusive deep dives on food tech trends, original market research, and virtual events with the smartest people in the industry.

You can read Mike’s post about the launch of Plus here to learn about why we’re so excited about it.

There’s a plan for every budget, and if you buy an annual subscription, you get a ticket to Smart Kitchen Summit Virtual 2020, the industry-leading global food tech summit.

Spoon Plus is our chance and yours to connect on a deeper level and engage with the issues in a more meaningful way. We are offering a one-time charter member discount of 40% for those that join by the end of this week. Join today and use coupon code LAUNCH at check out.

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Walmart Launches Two-Hour Express Delivery as Grocery E-Commerce Surges

Walmart announced Express Delivery, the company’s zippy new two-hour delivery service for food and other goods, yesterday. The new service comes in the middle of a global pandemic that has spurred a drastic wave of demand online grocery shopping.

According to the press announcement, Express Delivery was being tested in 100 stores since Mid-April. In early May, the service will broaden to nearly 1,000 stores before rolling out to 2,000 total stores in the ensuing weeks. Express Delivery costs an additional $10 on top of the initial delivery fee.

The obvious motivation for Express Delivery is simply that more people than ever are shopping for groceries online. In fact, a survey out this week from Brick Meets Click found that online grocery sales hit $5.3 billion in April, up 37 percent over March (which was its own record-setting month). Order number, size and frequency are all up as well.

In March, a market research study from Gordon Haskett Research Advisors found that Walmart was the top destination for those shopping for groceries online. So the company has been bearing the brunt of this crush of online shoppers.

Walmart, as well as every other grocery retailer, has been struggling to keep up e-commerce demand. It was looking to bring on an additional 150,000 workers this Spring to keep up. In addition to delivery and now Express Delivery, the retailer also expanded its contactless curbside pickup options.

Back before the dark times, Walmart was in the midst of working on Walmart+, its answer to Amazon Prime. Walmart+ reportedly would expand on Walmart’s Delivery Unlimited subscription service as well as offer perks on things like prescriptions and gas.

Speaking of Amazon, Walmart’s Express Delivery also brings it up to speed, as it were, with the two-hour delivery Amazon offers for free to its Prime members. Once this pandemic recedes, it’s not too hard to imagine Walmart’s Express Delivery, having been scaled and battle-tested by COVID-19-driven demand, would be a benefit of Walmart+.

For those interested in trying out Express Delivery, visit walmart.com/grocery or the Walmart app and search for your ZIP code to see if Express Delivery is offered in your area.

Thank You, Walmart and Safeway, for Keeping Us Fed. Now Fix Your Confusing and Misleading E-Commerce

Grocery stores have been a bright spot in this otherwise dark time of global pandemic. Store workers are braving an on-edge public and risking infection to stock shelves or come out to our homes to deliver groceries. I appreciate and thank them for all their hard work.

So it’s not on the front lines where grocery stores have an issue right now. Instead, it’s on the back end, in the way big grocery retailers manage and communicate about e-commerce orders, where the problems seem to be happening.

Like millions of others, my family has been self-isolating for a couple of weeks, which means more grocery shopping online. I’ve used Safeway for delivery and Walmart for curbside pickup. Both have problems with the way they relay information about out-of-stock items.

Before going off on too much of a rant, I should note that I’m extremely lucky. My wife and I are still employed, we are sufficiently stocked with food, and if need be, we can easily and safely go to an actual grocery store. But there are a lot of people in worse off situations, and those people need a consistent and reliable method for ordering groceries from home.

I also understand that we are in unprecedented times, and as such, people are stocking up/hoarding, so some items are just aren’t available. I have yet to find toilet paper anywhere online, and evidently everyone is baking loaves of sourdough, so there’s a run on flour.

The problems I’ve encountered with Safeway and Walmart is that those platforms accept and process my online order, leading me to believe all items are in stock and that I’ll get everything I need/want. Then, literally a couple hours before the scheduled pickup or delivery time, I get notifications telling me some items are out of stock and I won’t receive them.

In the case of the Safeway, it was a delivery order that had been placed a week and half prior. So during that time, I assumed my entire order would arrive and didn’t make any other plans to get groceries. Thankfully, the only things the store was out of were flour and yeast (to make bread, he admitted, sheepishly), and not more necessary staples like eggs or milk. But there was a gap of a week and a half in between the time I placed the order and the delivery date. At some point in there, Safeway should have communicated that items are out of stock so I could figure something else out.

The same thing happened with Walmart when I ordered food for curbside pickup. The system accepted my order the day before, leading me to believe everything was a-okay! Then the next day, shortly before I drove to the store for pickup I got an email from Walmart that basically said, “Just kidding! We’re out of a bunch of stuff you ordered.” Some of the items, like toilet paper, I kinda figured might disappear, but there were also things like fruits and vegetables in there that suddenly couldn’t be fulfilled. This was more baffling because Walmart is a logistics and supply chain monster. Why, then, was the online ordering so far off from reality in the 24-hour period between when I placed my order and when I picked it up?

Again, the reason for this whole rant is that as we are told to shelter in place and avoid crowds (especially if you’re older), e-commerce will become increasingly important, depending on how long this outbreak lasts. It’s critical that people can feel confident in the online orders they place. I’m fortunate in that I have the time and means to compensate if something goes awry. But there are lots of people who don’t, and lots of people who can’t go into the store because they have young kids, or are sick who will rely on online grocery shopping. If it’s too difficult to align store inventory with demand at a store, then retailers should improve and clarify messaging around orders so that people understand that what they receive may change, and if it does, give them ample time to either prepare for the outage or make substitutions.

For the most part, online grocery shopping is great! And I really do appreciate all the work Walmart and Safeway are putting in quickly to make it happen. We just need to make some changes to make sure we aren’t worse off in these worst of times.

We’re spending every day tracking the impact of COVID-19 on the world of food. Subscribe to our newsletter to get our analysis and hear stories from the front lines.

As Online Grocery Shopping Surges, Walmart Leads the Retail Pack (and Could Stay There)

With COVID-19 limiting movement in some cities and raising new concerns about being out in public among groups of people, there’s been a surge in online grocery shopping. And according to a piece in Bloomberg yesterday, Walmart was the top destination for online grocery shopping, which could translate into being the long-term leader in the space.

Bloomberg writes:

As online grocery shopping goes mainstream, Walmart will be the main beneficiary. One-third of shoppers surveyed by Gordon Haskett Research Advisors on March 13 said they bought food online over the past week, and of those, 41% were doing so for the first time. For those newbies, Walmart was by far the most popular option, capturing more than half of orders. Amazon and its Whole Foods chain garnered only 14%.

Now we don’t know how big the sample size of this survey was, but the results seem in-line with what we would expect. Walmart is a massive retail operation with a broad distribution of physical stores, so it makes sense it would be a big beneficiary of our current situation.

Prior to the global pandemic, Walmart and Amazon had been locked in a heated battle for supremacy in the online grocery space. The two retail giants exchanged tit-for-tat moves over the past year: Walmart launched and rolled out Delivery Unlimited for groceries nationwide, Amazon waived delivery fees for its Prime members, Walmart started testing its own Amazon Prime-like membership service, and Amazon started building its own physical grocery store locations.

Walmart already having physical locations definitely gives it an advantage in this time of social distancing. Walmart stores are there for people brave enough to actually go out and shop in person. The stores also act as a distributed network for home deliveries, or can provide pickup locations for online orders.

I myself am putting this last scenario to the test. I live in a more rural area and while delivery from my local Safeway couldn’t be fulfilled for more than a week and a half at the time of ordering, I can do an at-store pickup from Walmart tomorrow. Aside from a couple of minor hiccups, the Walmart app and online experience was pretty easy. Most everything I wanted was in stock, and if it wasn’t, they made it easy to swap.

As more people are forced into online grocery shopping for the first time they will go to where they can get the food and supplies they need in a timely manner. With Amazon struggling to keep up with delivery demand, Walmart, with its network of stores could become people’s de facto preference. And once they have an account set up with Walmart, re-stocking pantries will be that much easier as this lockdown continues and into a time in the hopefully not too distant future when we can emerge from our homes.