Inside Look At Technology of Grocery Pickup In Utah

One of the best innovations at grocery stores in the last few years is grocery pickup. You select the items you want from an online app, and they send you a time to come get them. Soon you are sitting in a reserved spot with your trunk up and almost magically, your groceries are placed inside and you are headed home.

It would be nice if they could carry them in from the garage, just sayin. 

Here’s an inside look at how that works. I talked with my niece Portia Hiatt who manages the department at a Smiths in northern Utah. After talking with her, I don’t think grocery pickup could have happened without the technology we enjoy. 

A computer takes all the orders entered by customers. It selects the number that can be loaded in an hour. It then routes the groceries through the store with the cold stuff at the end. Every item has an exact location in the store and as the employee comes to that spot the computer shows the item and which bin it should be placed in. 

“It’s really easy to fill orders,” said Portia. “You just follow what the computer says.” 

As simple as it seems, there is no way you could do it efficiently without technology. It also shows just how dependent we are on these computer brains. Just think, if the computers all went down, we would be in big trouble. We would have to go and select groceries off the shelf and put them in the cart ourselves. I don’t know if I could survive.