Shoppers in Wausau can now buy groceries online and pick them up without ever entering the store, as an east side store rolls out a new service this week.
On Thursday, Lamb’s Fresh Market, 730 E. Wausau Ave., announced online grocery shopping and curbside pickup on the store’s Facebook page. The locally-owned grocer, formerly IGA, will fill online orders and bring them to your waiting vehicle for a $6.99 fee, all to help busy customers save time.
Shoppers visit shop.lambsmarket.com to select items, then pay online. The service requires a $30 minimum order.
Once the order has been packed in the store, customers receive a text message with two links: one to press when they are five minutes from the store and one for when they arrive. When the link is pressed, that alerts employees to bring the order out and load it into the vehicle.
The move comes when online grocery sales are expected to grow five-fold over the next decade, with American consumers spending upwards of $100 billion on food at home items by 2025. That’s according to a report issued in June by the Food Marketing Institute and Nielson.
Around a quarter of American households currently buy some groceries online, up from 19 percent in 2014, and more than 70 percent will engage with online food shopping within 10 years, according to “The Digitally Engaged Food Shopper” report. It also found that of those who will buy digitally, 60 percent expect to spend about a quarter of their food dollars online in 10 years.
The report also found millennial shoppers surveyed were more willing to buy groceries online in the future than other consumer groups. It also pointed out that roughly 3 in 5 grocery shoppers today are looking for sales or coupons on their mobile devices before entering the store and that just over half will use mobile apps to shop.
“Grocery shopping will reach digital maturity and saturation faster than other industries that went online before, such as publishing or banking,” said the report. “Younger, newer and more engaged digital shoppers adopt digital technologies more quickly, and will hasten the expansion of digital grocery shopping further.”
