• Gulfshore Business Daily reported that there are expectations that Kroger could be serving southwest Florida via a pure-play e-commerce model by the end of 2022.
“I don’t have a specific timeline, but I do expect it will happen within the next year," says Andrea Colby, Kroger’s e-commerce corporate affairs and communications manager.
The story notes that Kroger "entered the Florida market this summer with the launch of a 375,000-square-foot customer fulfillment center in Groveland, just west of Orlando. Kroger also has 'spokes' in Jacksonville and Tampa, where products from refrigerated tractor-trailers from Groveland are loaded into refrigerated vans for final delivery directly to customers within a 90-minutes radius. To serve the Naples-Fort Myers area, another spoke location will be created, Colby said, noting that Fort Myers and Miami areas would be future spoke locations with warehouses designed to serve customers within a 90-minute radius from each location."
• From the Associated Press, a story about how Carrefour in the United Arab Emirates has "rolled out its vision for the future of the industry in a cavernous Dubai mall.
"Like Amazon’s breakthrough unmanned grocery stores that opened in 2018, the Carrefour mini-market looks like any ordinary convenience store, brimming with sodas and snacks, tucked between sprawling storefronts of this city-state.
"But hidden among the familiar fare lies a sophisticated system that tracks shoppers’ movements, eliminating the checkout line and allowing people to grab the products they’ll walk out with. Only those with the store’s smartphone app may enter. Nearly a hundred small surveillance cameras blanket the ceiling. Countless sensors line the shelves. Five minutes after shoppers leave, their phones ping with receipts for whatever they put in their bags."
The story says that "the experimental shop, called Carrefour City+, is the latest addition to the burgeoning field of retail automation. Major retailers worldwide are combining machine learning software and artificial intelligence in a push to cut labor costs, do away with the irritation of long lines and gather critical data about shopping behavior."
