Many have tried to make it big in the online grocery business and most have failed. That certainly hasn't stopped others from trying and the latest to give it a go is Sears Holdings.
According to a Chicago Tribune report last week, the owner of Sears and Kmart is testing its own online grocery business in lower Manhattan and out in the Hamptons on Long Island, New York. The Sears website adds that the service is available in the western suburbs of Chicago, and in the Boston and Washington, D.C. markets.
The service is an extension of the company's mygofer.com offering. Sears Holdings launched mygofer to bring together the best of a web-based service and a brick and mortar operation. Consumers go online to order items from the service and then pick them up at a local drive-through.
"When customers want something, they want it today and they want it now," Imran Jooma, senior vice president for e-commerce for Sears Holdings, told attendees at the Internet Retailer trade show. "So we center our efforts on giving them choice, convenience and value. The choice to get whatever they want, whenever they want it and however they want it."
Price is also important, according to Mr. Jooma, who cited Sears' 110 percent price guarantee.
"You don't have to make sure you have the right price, you will," he told the Internet Retailer conference audience.
Sears' Food & Grocery item page includes the message that its service "makes the express lane look like molasses." It boasts that local pickup and delivery from mygofer.com is "the fastest way to get your groceries from your cart to your countertop."
While he declined to confirm if mygofer departments would be set up in Kmart stores or in some other type of facility, Mr. Jooma told the Trib, "There will be more mygofers."
Discussion Questions: Do groceries make sense in the context of Sears Holdings' overall e-commerce strategy? Does the mygofer pickup option make it more likely Sears will succeed with online groceries than others following a delivery-only model?