Walmart associate Mesha Davis and John Calloway, a field e-commerce market coach for Walmart, demonstrate how customers are able to pickup groceries at a new Walmart Neighborhood Market in Fayetteville.
Walmart’s convenient grocery pickup service is drawing remarkable attention across the U.S., and the service is being expanded to more and more locations in Northwest Arkansas and nationwide.
The Walmart Neighborhood Market in south Fayetteville, which opened May 25, is among the newest locations to provide the service to customers.
Customers interviewed by media outlets described how they were impressed with the Bentonville companies’ grocery pickup expansions in news stories published in Atlanta; Pensacola, Fla.; Grand Junction, Colo.; El Paso, Texas; Amarillo, Texas; and a few other Texas cities. They describe grocery pickup as time saving, efficient and practical.
It’s remarkable how much time grocery shopping can take. A study by the Time Use Institute showed grocery shopping takes the average person about 41 minutes. It’s a bit longer if the shopping occurs on weekends (45 minutes) instead of weekdays (38 minutes), the study showed.
Walmart over the past two months has added the grocery pickup service at store locations in Kansas City; Austin; Boise; Charlotte; Richmond and Virginia Beach, Va.; Provo, Utah; and Charleston, S.C.
Walmart celebrated the opening if its first Walmart Pickup Grocery fulfillment center in Bentonville in September 2014, and that facility remains a grocery pickup only location. By September 2015, the company’s expansions of the grocery pickup service included five Walmart Neighborhood Markets in Northwest Arkansas, located in Springdale, Fayetteville, Rogers and Bentonville.
While more people are discovering the service in Northwest Arkansas, not everyone knows how it works. Here are the basics:
- Customers log on to the Walmart Grocery website. A $30 minimum purchase is required, but the service itself is free. Items cost the same as they would for customers who walk through stores.
- Personal shoppers, who are trained to pick out the freshest meat, seatfood, dairy and produce items, collect the products ordered by customers. More than 30,000 items are available.
- Orders placed before 1 a.m. are available by 8 a.m., and those places by 10 a.m. are ready by 4 p.m. Customers determine timeslots when they’d like to pick up their orders.
- Customers receive a phone call from a store associate who lets them know their order is ready.
- When they arrive at the store, customers pull into reserved parking spaces for online pickup customers. Customers never leave their vehicles when picking up the items at the store. Walmart associates bring them outside and load them in vehicles.
