ecommerce

Walmart’s latest grocery experiment involves stocking your fridge when you’re not home

September 24, 2017

Image: Joe Raedle/Getty Images

Walmart is now offering to stock your fridge for you—even if you’re not home.

The big-box giant is teaming with a smart lock startup called August Home to test a service in which workers would use a temporary door code to deliver groceries straight to your kitchen.

“Think about that—someone else does the shopping for you AND puts it all away,” Walmart vp Sloan Eddleston wrote in a blog post announcing the test. “This may not be for everyone–and certainly not right away–but we want to offer customers the opportunity to participate in tests.”

The deliveries will be monitored by security cameras provided by the startup, and customers will have the option of watching the process in real-time via an app. The couriers—contracted through the startup Deliv—will only let themselves in if no one answers August Home’s smart doorbell, which triggers a smartphone notification when pressed.

The trial is currently limited to a small group of August Home customers in Silicon Valley.

Walmart’s been doubling down on sometimes-quirky experiments like these as it looks for new ways to challenge Amazon’s dominance of the online shopping market. The online grocery market has been one of the most cutthroat fronts of that battle, especially since Amazon took over Whole Foods in a blockbuster deal this summer.

Some of its other tests include a service in which its employees drop off online orders on their way home from work, a giant grocery vending machine in the parking lot of some stores, and drive-thru store pick-up. It also announced this week that it will begin accepting food stamps for online grocery orders for the first time.

Despite its vast potential, online grocery still only makes up about one percent of the total market, and surveys show most Americans still aren’t very comfortable with online grocery shopping altogether. So if the idea of delivery people shuffling through people’s kitchens does catch on, it probably won’t be anytime soon.

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