Pickup-only grocery stores

Pickup-only grocery stores

The supermarket and grocery industry is estimated at $682B as of 2020, growing at a rather torpid 0.5% a year. While the trend of the last decades has been towards ever-larger superstores (think Walmart and Target), there's an argument that more opportunity lies in moving in the opposite direction. 

Smaller, pickup-only grocery stores could offer a few advantages, particularly in metropolitan areas. On the business side, they would reduce two of the biggest cost centers: headcount and footprint. Less expensive sub-street level space could be leveraged for storage, in addition to facilities outside a city. Customers could place orders ahead of time and have their orders ready to go when they arrived. Having customer's phone numbers would also be an advantage, allowing for special offers or other incentives to be shared. 

Of course, minimizing social interaction is particularly important right now. But there are reasons to think this model might work post-pandemic, too.

-- Molly O'Shea, Investor at Train Mix

- Voxup posted a problem regarding Food from United States of America