Amazon buying Whole Foods has been the biggest food news story of the year, and it has consumers asking one big question: How will grocery shopping change in 2018? Amazon already has futuristic features in its own Amazon Go stores—for one, there are no checkout lines. (Everything is scanned using the Amazon app, so you can just walk out with your stuff.) And there's industry chatter speculating that Whole Foods will soon be checkout line-less, too. How will other retailers respond? Walmart, for one, isn't waiting around.
Recode reports that a "test" location is experimenting with a similar zero checkout line model. The whole idea is still being kept way under wraps: No one at Walmart has commented on it, and it isn't being tested with customers. So if it's true, it's early days—but that's not all the retail giant is reportedly exploring.
Citing multiple unnamed sources, Recode reports that Code Eight, a subsidiary of Walmart, will soon start offering a personal shopping service of sorts for the "high net worth urban consumer"—with free delivery within 24 for household goods and a maximum two-day wait time for everything else. The whole service is offered via text. You can even just send a photo of what you need. Welcome to the future of grocery shopping.
Regardless of how you feel about the Amazon-Whole Foods deal, it's undeniable that the partnership is putting pressure on other retailers, forcing them to get creative about what's being offered to consumers.
What's next—outsourcing the grocery-shopping chore altogether? Here's why it would probably be worth the money. In the meantime, don't make these food shopping mistakes even healthy people make.
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