Walmart hits major milestone—in Amazon's backyard

As the online delivery wars heat up, Walmart is expanding its grocery pickup service to the hometown of one of its biggest rivals.



Walmart will open its 1,000th online grocery pickup location on Sept. 6, with the addition of five stores in Seattle. The free service, initially piloted in 2013 in Denver, enables customers to order groceries online and pick them up at their local Walmart store without leaving their cars. To pick up an order, customers park in a specified parking space, and enter a designated number to alert an associate, who retrieves the prepared order and loads it into the customer’s car.



“Our daily mission is to help our customers keep a little more money in their pockets and add more time in their schedules," said Mike Turner, VP of e-commerce operations for Walmart U.S." Online Grocery is doing that for the millions of customers who have tried the service, so we won’t stop with store 1,000.”



In celebration of its 1,000th milestone, Walmart will give away Google Home connected devices to the first 250 customers who use the service in Seattle. The discounter recently teamed up with Google to offer hundreds of thousands of items available for voice shopping via Google Assistant, the online shopping platform that lives on Google Home http://www.chainstoreage.com/article/walmart-deal-google-offer-voice-activated-shopping



In addition to pickup locations, Walmart is also piloting online grocery delivery in six markets.



Among shoppers that use the online pickup service, 89% use it to save time, while 83% enjoy shopping in the comfort of their own home. Final-ly, 79% said they favor the service because they can shop any time, ac-cording to Walmart.