Meijer Offers Personalized Express Shopping

Who has time to trawl the grocery store after a 10-hour work day? Meijer hopes to address the needs of time-starved shoppers with its new Grocery Express program. Shoppers can make online selections from more than 27,000 grocery and health and beauty care items listed on the website and have them delivered to their car at a designated location in the grocery store’s parking lot. The cost of convenience is a $24.95 subscription for unlimited orders during a 30-day period or $6.95 for an individual order.

“People can shop online and, three hours later, they can pull up to the store and receive their order hand-delivered by a personal shopper,” said Rob Fleener, vp of business development and commerce at Meijer. Customers can schedule pick-up times from three hours to seven days from the time they place their order. They can make changes in orders up to three hours prior to pick-up.

In testing for more than a year at a location near Meijer’s Grand Rapids, Mich. headquarters, Grocery Express launched this week in two Chicago suburbs. Average basket size during the test period was 50 items, said Fleener, and the most popular items included baby products and staples such as milk, bread, eggs and cereal.