Walmart blends in-store and online grocery shopping experience

Bentonville, Arkansas

AS Sam's Club began allowing customers to buy their groceries online and pick them up in person, the Walmart-owned chain of stores noticed a frequent conundrum: Customers were having to wait too long in the warehouses to get their goods.

The culprit, they determined, was frozen foods. They couldn't keep these items alongside the dry and packaged goods in an order, so when a customer arrived, workers would have to make their way across the sprawling store to get the frozen items. This presented a wrinkle in achieving the goal of faster shopping trips - the central purpose of store pickups.