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Kroger's grocery stores, and their subsidiaries like King Sooper's, are starting to do this a lot too. As others have mentioned, it is simply a marketing ploy to get more people to order online and then pickup or have delivered.
Kroger's grocery stores, and their subsidiaries like King Sooper's, are starting to do this a lot too. As others have mentioned, it is simply a marketing ploy to get more people to order online and then pickup or have delivered.
Yes. At KS at least, there are fewer and fewer shelf discounts and a heavy push to use the app and/or online ordering to get coupons and discounts.
Even auto parts stores like advance auto parts do it too. You go in to the store get the price on something you need and then tell them, hey I saw online you have a 20% discount right now. They will tell you that is for online sales only and they can't give it to you in store. So then you say I will get back to you. You go to your car and have a seat. Go to their website, enter the info, find the thing you need, put it in the cart, go to checkout, apply the 20% off code, select in store pickup and pay. Get out of your car, go back in the store, get the guy you already talked to about the thing, get him to pull up your online order, go get the thing, verify your ID, print a receipt showing you picked the item up and then you are on your way. It is complete insanity I tell you. lol
You forgot one other element, the corporate entity will now gather a lot of your personal info and utilize for marketing purposes and if they are large entity they will bury the small print about sharing it with affiliates. The pizza place probably won't but other types of B&M retail will for sure.
You then will probably start getting email marketing offers versus other forms of media (depending on the industry/ product / service) being offered to pull you into store or drive you to online site. Coupons, discount codes, loyalty program perks etc...
My online order for a bathroom vanity special worked out well with the big box store. They hold in special place for pickup, Worked seamlessly.
Yes. At KS at least, there are fewer and fewer shelf discounts and a heavy push to use the app and/or online ordering to get coupons and discounts.
I agree. Every time I shop at King Sooper's, I complain their online coupon system is getting to be less valuable and more of a pain in the ass. In fact, I have started to switch to Safeway.
While there are probably inefficient implementations of this new (to B&M sellers) process, you've grossly overstated the problems.
No one is sitting there 'monitoring a computer' for the orders like some eBay seller; a terminal alerts the CS or warehouse staff when an order comes in. It may be a bit of a wash between you trundling through the store, finding the item and checking out and a floor person doing most of that for you, but the advantage is that you know the item and total without leaving home, and most stores allow you to just go to the CS counter up front for pickup, which is far quicker than circling around to the checkout line.
I think you're missing the overall point, the future goals and the immediate situation of trying to blend two shopping modes. For one thing, there's absolutely no reason for you to use online order if you dislike it so much.
Explain the guy standing there at a computer looking at the online sales at Advance Auto parts, printing the pull slip, going and finding the parts and placing them on a shelf behind the sales counter to wait for someone to come pick them up. I have bought them that way and had to wait on the guy to pull my order up on the computer (the same one he would have looked my part up on if I had just walked in to buy) and then he had to go get it because no one had gotten to it yet. The same thing happens at Walmart or Target and most of the other brick and mortar stores. It is stupid and inefficient. You say they are currently trying to blend two shopping modes and that is precisely the problem. They are trying to blend online sales into their current site stores and it doesn't make any sense the way they are doing it.
It is stupid and inefficient. You say they are currently trying to blend two shopping modes and that is precisely the problem. They are trying to blend online sales into their current site stores and it doesn't make any sense the way they are doing it.
So don't use it. Problem solved.
You clearly don't grasp (or care to grasp) the dynamics behind these changes, nor seem to understand that all changes to large social/economic systems involve a time of what can be politely called "inefficiency." But then, you don't need to... but complaining loudly and at length about how it doesn't work for you adds nothing to the discussion.
I agree. Every time I shop at King Sooper's, I complain their online coupon system is getting to be less valuable and more of a pain in the ass. In fact, I have started to switch to Safeway.
Safeway is more expensive and, IME, has a long history of being a much bigger PITA about pricing. When I relocated here, it was clear my choice for daily groceries was either Safeway - which I came to hate in California - or KS. I ended up settling on KS because their general pricing was lower and they had frequent sales on items I tended to buy. I still pick up a prescription from time to time at Safeway and am staggered at the shelf prices of comparative goods; instead of doing a little convenient shopping I just take the scrip and leave.
But KS has undergone a sea change in the last year, transforming its pricing and discount structure, leaping ahead years in the practice. From a lot of shelf discounts and general coupons, they've gone to a highly deceptive shelf pricing system - many, many products have big tags identical to sale tags but inconspicuously marked "LOW PRICE" - e.g. regular shelf price. Sales are fewer and further between and rarely of the percentage of just months past - but it's hard to tell because glancing down an aisle shows a plethora of those exciting yellow tags.
Where they've leaped past most other stores is tying nearly all discounts to individually-generated coupons and sale offers, tied to the loyalty card and the app and the self-pricing scanner and so forth. It's not that they've done so - expect this to be standard practice within a few more years - but that they've jumped their practices ahead about four or five years in less than a year. I wonder how many shoppers even notice that they are likely paying 5-20% more, with all the razzle-dazzle and blizzard of shelf tags and coupons. The illusion of deals, deals, deals is if anything more prominent than before.
This is the real purpose of all that tracking - for years it was a background or underutilized practice; it's now used to tailor shopping to individuals, and not to any of theirs (or our) benefit. For one thing, they have also reduced product selection in nearly every department. Those who think tracking is a good thing because "it means they'll always carry my brand of peanut butter" have no idea how the data is actually being used - a good part of it is eliminating lower-profit items in ways that will lose a minimum of shoppers.
These are all examples of brick and mortar stores that still do not understand or know how to utilize and market too online and app sales. They do some of the dumbest things like as you mentioned, offer 20% off if you buy online or through the app and then you come to the store and pick it up. Which results in someone at the store having to monitor a computer for online sales coming in and then someone has to go retrieve it from the shelf or warehouse, bring it to the front and then still have to check you out by verifying you are the buyer which often takes longer than it would have taken if you had gone through a checkout lane and just paid for it yourself, especially if you had gone through self checkout in the store. It is moronic and the upper level corporate managers at these big chain stores just don't get it and come up with these stupid ideas to try to get some of the online sales.
Its really not as complicated as you make it out to be. I do store pick up at Target a lot.
Customer service gets a notification of the order, and whoever is in that department will bring it up while doing restock. Sometimes it takes 5 minutes for a store pick up to be ready, sometimes it takes 2 hours. The employees don't drop everything they're doing and rush to the back of the store.
Once the order is ready, an automated email is sent out alerting the customer that there order is ready, they stop by customer service, show their ID, and are on their way. Payment is done online, so nothing is needed to be done in store. The whole pick up process takes maybe 30 seconds, if even that long.
Even auto parts stores like advance auto parts do it too. You go in to the store get the price on something you need and then tell them, hey I saw online you have a 20% discount right now. They will tell you that is for online sales only and they can't give it to you in store. So then you say I will get back to you. You go to your car and have a seat. Go to their website, enter the info, find the thing you need, put it in the cart, go to checkout, apply the 20% off code, select in store pickup and pay. Get out of your car, go back in the store, get the guy you already talked to about the thing, get him to pull up your online order, go get the thing, verify your ID, print a receipt showing you picked the item up and then you are on your way. It is complete insanity I tell you. lol
I just went through this exact same thing when buying a battery. Even the employees don’t seem to like it, because when you walk in and say “I have an online order” they just have a look on their face like ‘oh boy, another one of these’.
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