Why aren't grocery stores thinking more about the future of online delivery?
Across Canada, millions of people following government orders or recommendations to stay at home to avoid COVID-19 are facing a big problem — how to get food and other essentials delivered so that they don’t have to trek to the grocery story in quasi-hazmat gear, with all the risks that entails.
The situation is bad now — particularly for people who work in the stores, or deliver the goods, as well as for seniors and/or the disabled who have traditionally depended on delivery services but who now find themselves competing for the few and far between dates and times available.
But we’re kidding ourselves if we think this is going to go away soon. Experts say the current wave of coronavirus will ebb in the summer but could return in the fall.
Yet there are few signs that businesses in the food industry are gearing up for long-term changes, including a permanent shift for many people to online ordering in what I have already described as the increasingly digital world to come as a result of the current crisis.
Yes, many grocery chains are hiring more workers to meet the current crush. That’s good, of course. Yes, new companies are spring up on the delivery side. But they are still not able to cope with the flood of demand.
That will happen within a few months. But businesses today need to be doing more than treading water and hoping coronavirus will pass at some point soon and we’ll be back to “normal.” It won’t. And we won’t.
They need to look hard at digital strategy and solutions.
Some suggestions, for both now and the long term:
All major grocery chains, at least where I live, are offering only short-term delivery dates and they are grabbed as fast as they are available. It should be easy from a digital perspective to offer delivery dates 3-4 weeks down the road. That’s one quick solution that could ease the current frenzy. Doing that is easy. Thinking that far ahead is the hard part.
The chains should also have a digital record of those people who relied on delivery before the crisis, such as seniors and the disabled. Again, this might take a bit of work, but it should be fairly easy to transfer those names to a priority list within their online ordering systems in order to protect the most vulnerable.
When deliveries are made, they almost always are incomplete. The chains generally do include on delivery a list of what they did not deliver. That’s helpful but there’s no accompanying explanation of why particular items were not included. I know that in the case of my family some of the items not delivered were not marked “in short supply” or “out” less than 24 hours before delivery. The chains should hire more people to keep their online ordering system updated hourly if they are truly in short supply. That’s a no-brainer and cost-effective.
The time to think long-term about the increasingly digital world is now.
Further reading:
Grocery delivery delays a disaster for disabled people
New grocery service in Toronto overwhelmed by demand
On-demand grocery delivery service launches in Winnipeg amid pandemic
