Wal-Mart Already Has a Thriving Online Grocery Business—in China
An employee fills electronic orders in a special storage room for the one-hour delivery platform at a Wal-Mart store in Shanghai.
Photographer: Qilai Shen/Bloomberg
Amazon.com Inc. has sent a chill through the U.S. supermarket business. Its $13.7 billion purchase of Whole Foods Markets Inc. stirred fears that it may solve one of the great puzzles of American e-commerce: how to sell fresh foods to online shoppers with the same speed and predictability that the industry has for, say, books or computers. But grocers also had better keep an eye on the world’s largest brick-and-mortar retailer—Wal-Mart Stores Inc.—for some lessons on the future of online grocery shopping.
Wal-Mart has already developed a big online grocery delivery business in China, capable of transporting fresh produce from its shelves to homes within an hour. To accomplish that feat, it’s created a network of chilled mini-warehouses, used artificial intelligence to tailor inventories, and employed an army of crowdsourced deliverymen to rush meat, fruits, and vegetables to customers’ doorsteps. That could provide the megaretailer with plenty of insight and experience to keep tech upstarts from disrupting it out of one of its core U.S. businesses.