Amazon Grocery Stores Coming

The company apparently is keen to launch its drive-thru service, too, with the sources saying Amazon wants to launch drive-in locations for grocery order pickups.

The retailer continues to operate this new offering with its cyber roots in place however, with plans for online ordering and purchasing items via phones or other touchscreen devices.

Online sales remain a fraction of total supermarket sales.

Also, about 80 percent of the USA population lives within 2.5 miles of a supermarket, according to Jim Hertel, senior vice president at grocery consultancy Willard Bishop.

For the better part of the last decade, Amazon Fresh has been an enigma.

Grocery delivery isn’t an unnatural fit for Amazon. “All these things are combining to create more demand”.

E-commerce giant Amazon is venturing further out of its cyber kingdom and into the grocery circuit. But Cowen and Company expects the online retailer to grow to become a top 10 player by 2019. Super-fast service at small High Street stores, linked to Amazon Fresh checkouts on shoppers’ mobiles, make such stores ultra-convenient.

Amazon (AMZN) isn’t going to sit idly by as Wal-Mart (WMT) zeroes in on the online grocery business.

Amazon’s foray into brick-and-mortar comes at a time when other companies in the super-hot food-delivery space are grappling with money-losing operations.

In the three years since, Amazon has expanded Fresh to a few more markets: San Francisco, then the NY metro area and, more recently, Boston, Baltimore and London, too.

Amazon is reportedly opening drive-in locations to bring online grocery orders to the vehicle.

“The U.S. food and beverage grocery market has reached a tipping point, in our view”, Cowen and Co. analyst John Blackledge said in an industry report this year, according to CNBC. The system is particularly popular with busy parents who don’t want to take children out of auto seats or don’t have time to wander cavernous stores, store executives say. The tech giant opened a bookstore in Seattle a year ago and has more on the way.

Kroger, too, is expanding the number of stores where it offers click-and-collect service, which it calls ClickList. The company that was supposed to be upending the physical retail experience (not to say they haven’t) is venturing into the in-person shopping experience.

The shops are reported to include items such as milk and meats, as well as the option to buy other products for same-day delivery.