Walmart tests kiosks where customers order via app, pick up from automated station; firm trialling groceries in Oklahoma City, general products in five cities
Walmart is trying out an automated kiosk where online shoppers can pick up their groceries, officials with the retail store have announced.
Context & Ripple Effects
This kiosk trial slots into a two-track experiment Walmart was running on the last mile of online orders. On one track, it had just partnered with Uber and Lyft for grocery delivery in Denver and Phoenix, following Sam's Club's Miami pilot with Deliv — the delivery-side experiments. The Oklahoma City and five-city kiosk test is the pickup counterpart: instead of bringing orders to the customer's door, automate where the customer collects them.
The bet paid out quickly. Within a year Walmart moved from this small trial to a 500-store rollout of Pickup Towers after debuting them at 200 stores in 2017, then layered in floor-scrubbing and shelf-scanning robots by 2019, and by 2021 was automating the back of store too with Alert Innovation and Dematic for picking and packing groceries.
First-order effects
- Walmart shoppers in Oklahoma City and five other cities get a new fulfillment option — order in the app, collect from an automated station rather than waiting in line or at a service counter.
Second-order effects
- Once the kiosk model proved out, competitors' click-and-collect operations faced a labor-cost gap at handoff, pushing Walmart to extend automation from the pickup point back into picking and packing with partners like Alert Innovation and Dematic.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds, stores restructure around automated handoff and fulfillment hardware as standard fixtures — the kiosk becomes one node in a store-as-fulfillment-center architecture spanning towers, robots, and delivery fleets.
The trend: Retailers are converting physical stores into automated fulfillment nodes, with Walmart scaling from kiosk pickup pilots toward end-to-end store automation.