Why stop at having your groceries dropped off at your front door when a real-live human can put all your groceries away for you? That’s a question Walmart is asking you; the company wants to do just that for its customers this year. The retailer is not only aiming to offer same-day delivery from 1,600 locations — and grocery pickup from 3,100 stores — by year-end; it’s also introducing a new way to order fresh groceries by delivering straight to customers’ kitchen or garage fridge: Walmart InHome Delivery.
On June 7, Walmart announced InHome Delivery, a new service designed to help customers save time and increase convenience by delivering groceries even when customers aren’t home.
The way it works is customers place their grocery order online, select InHome Delivery and choose what day they want it delivered. After shopping for the groceries, a Walmart associate then uses smart entry technology and “a proprietary, wearable camera to access the customer’s home – allowing customers to control access into their homes and giving them the ability to watch the deliveries remotely,” the press release states.
Walmart continues to state that their associates will go through an extensive training program that’ll prepare them to enter the customers’ homes with care and respect, as well as learn how to select the freshest grocery items and — get this — organize your refrigerator.
Later this year, Walmart also plans to, via InHome, accept returns for items purchased on its website by leaving the items on their kitchen counter and the associate will return the item on their behalf.
Here’s the thing, though: Do we really need someone we don’t know stepping into our homes? Sure, they may be saving us time by doing our grocery shopping for us and putting the groceries away, but that seems more anxiety-inducing knowing there’s a stranger walking around our kitchen — regardless if they’re wearing a camera. If you don’t have time to go grocery shopping, then you likely don’t have time to watch the livestream of the associate dropping off the groceries, either. Plus, Walmart tested the idea in Silicon Valley, California back in 2017, and it made people nervous then, so why would that change now?
InHome plans to launch this fall for over one million customers across three cities: Kansas City, Missouri; Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania; and Vero Beach, Florida.
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