“Our customers have been clear: They love the Pickup Tower,” Walmart wrote in a blog post. “But, they also told us they wanted the ability to retrieve larger items the same way.”
To use the Pickup Towers, which are 16 feet tall and approximately 8 feet wide, customers place an order online and receive a barcode on a digital recipe. When they enter the store, they scan the barcode from their phones on the machine’s scanner to pick up the order in a process that lasts for less than 60 seconds.
Walmart said the reception to the existing 200 kiosks was “overwhelming positive” and that customers have picked up more than a half million orders since their introduction. The retailer debuted the first of the giant self-service kiosks in the fall of 2016 in a Bentonville, Arkansas store.
The Pickup Towers are just for customers using the buy-online-pick-up-in-store service, although a similar self-service kiosk was in the works for customers who use Walmart.com to shop for their groceries. A pilot was tested in the parking lot of the Walmart Supercenter in Warr Acres, Oklahoma.
When online grocery shoppers arrive at the kiosk, they can key-in an access code to trigger the machine to retrieve their order. Employees pack orders into bins ahead of time and store them in the 20-by-80-foot building, equipped with freezers and refrigeration to keep food fresh.
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Unlike the Pickup Tower, which is located inside the store, the grocery kiosk has the potential to be open 24 hours a day. The big box chain may have hoped that the kiosk would provide an edge over eCommerce competitor Amazon, which finally opened its Seattle drive-through grocery pick-up facilities to the public.
