Walmart Unveils New Concept Store in Bentonville

As consumers change, the grocery store landscape is changing with them.

One of the reasons buyers are changing their habits is an increasing involvement with technology, leading to a rise in online ordering and delivery.

To that end, ShopTopic, a bi-monthly report that takes an analytic look at the retail industry, reported recently that the growth in e-commerce grocery revenue from 2013 to 2018 is expected to be 57 percent, regardless of payment or fulfillment method.

Ever mindful of the trend as the nation’s largest grocer and one of the fastest growing e-commerce companies, Wal-Mart Stores Inc. has been testing a new concept in Bentonville, a drive-thru supermarket called Walmart Pickup-Grocery.

The free service gives customers the option to place orders and pay online, then pick up the items at a 15,000-SF building near the corner of Dodson Road and Walton Boulevard.

The facility carries 10,000 grocery and household items, all priced the same as in a brick-and-mortar Walmart store.

Customers drive to the location and use one of several available kiosks to let Walmart attendants know they have arrived. Walmart employees deliver the groceries and load them into to customers’ cars. Items may be retrieved in as little as two hours, or up to three weeks after being ordered.

“It isn’t really a store, but a pickup location,” said Jason Shaffer, a senior director of innovation for Walmart and a project manager for the concept. “The store exists in the virtual environment on the Internet. This is just a mini-fulfillment center that facilitates the quick, convenient pickup.”

Walmart officials would not say what the final cost for the project was. According to public records, Nabholz Construction in Rogers built the facility using a building permit valued at $809,838.

The standalone pickup facility opened in “beta test” for Walmart associates the first week of September. It was offered to the public starting Sept. 29.

Shaffer said the selling point of the concept for customers is simple: grocery shopping that can be quick and hassle free.

What he has learned from the initial days of store testing, though, has been somewhat unexpected: Customers are not just shopping for a few items at a time.

“An interesting thing we have seen is what the trip intent is and what we thought it might be,” he said. “A lot of the design was around a convenience trip. We are seeing that, but we are also seeing a stock-up trip. I think when customers go online and see the breadth of [product assortment] we have there and what really moves in our business, we’ve got it there.”

The Bentonville facility is the latest example of Walmart’s adoption of online grocery fulfillment. In San Francisco, the company is testing a Walmart To Go concept, allowing customers to order online and have groceries delivered to their home.

In Denver, local Walmart stores offer free grocery pickup service.

Through these stores, Shaffer said Walmart has a lab to gather feedback from its associates and customers to help develop future innovations in the industry.

Speaking specifically to the Bentonville test store, Shaffer said training employees who have impeccable customer service is high on the list of goals.

“We really want friendly associates who are there at the car to help,” he said. “We’re shooting for Disney-like customer service.”

On the operational side, Shaffer said he isn’t sure how long the maturation process will be. There will be functional tweaks to make, and decisions made early in the process may have to be rethought.

“We’re not sure how much re-thinking we need to do until we see the needs of the building,” he said. “If we get 90 percent of orders coming in the night before, that makes it pretty easy to run this building. If we get 90 percent of orders on the same day [as pickup], then it makes it relatively difficult to run this building. We’ll wait to see how all that shakes out.”