Convenience Stores

Amazon.com is now offering one-hour deliveries of grocery items to Prime Now members in the Dallas area, via an expanded partnership with Sprouts Farmers Market.

The e-tailer will allow Dallas Prime Now members to shop for Sprouts items via their accounts. Orders will then be picked from a local Sprouts store by Amazon and Sprouts employees and given to a driver for delivery.

Phillips Edison Grocery Center REIT I Inc. is acquiring a grocery-anchored shopping center, expanding the company’s holdings in Massachusetts.

Northwoods Crossing is a 159,562-sq.-ft. grocery store-anchored shopping center in Taunton, Massachusetts, a suburb 40 miles south of Boston. The center is anchored by BJ’s Wholesale Club. It also features national and regional tenants such as Tractor Supply Company, Dollar Tree, Subway, Ruby Tuesday and Wendy’s.

The expansion of online fulfillment availability is giving retailers new avenues for selling goods via the Internet.

The latest example of how non-traditional e-commerce opportunities are popping up is a just-launched partnership between Food Network and Instacart. The lifestyle network/website does directly sell a variety of cooking-related products and utensils online, but until now has not been involved in the sale of food items.

Marc’s, a 58-store deep-discounter of grocery, health and beauty products and other items, is providing targeted recommendations with help from national partners.   The Cleveland-based retailer is teaming up with Allrecipes to introduce in-store beacon-triggered experiences that provide shoppers with personalized meal recommendations through the Allrecipes Dinner Spinner app. In-store notifications are triggered on shoppers’ smartphones by a Verifone beacon system running on the Footmarks SmartConnect proximity platform.

Meijer has expanded its store footprint in Michigan, opening a new 192,000-sq.-ft. supercenter in Sturgis.
 
The new store is the latest of nine new Meijer supercenters to open – and part of an investment of more than $400 million in new and remodeled stores – this year, which will create 3,000 new jobs across the Grand Rapids, Michigan-based retailer's six-state footprint.

Walmart is teaming up with a few third-party partners — including two names very familiar to consumers — to take on its biggest rival in the competitive in the area of online delivery.  

Image credit: Ted Eytan, CC by 2.0   While many retailers are focused on making stores a destination to experience, some aim for an even higher level of customer engagement by casting themselves in the role of community center.     Others have even become a global destination for enthusiasts. These retailers understand that one way to energize a fervent fan base is to offer a singular fan base. Here are a few examples:   

Image Courtesy: Christopher Michel, CC by 2.0