A look at the rising popularity of curbside pickup at US retail chains like Target, which coincided with Amazon's struggles during the pandemic's early months
Online orders have surged for retailers in the pandemic, as curbside pickup helps Americans satisfy their desire to hop in a car and drive to the store. Tweets: @nytimesbusiness , @ennisnyt , @sallyshin , @dealbook , @nytimesbusiness , @nytimesbusiness , @ennisnyt , @nytimesbusiness , @sapna , @sapna , and @sapna Tweets: @nytimesbusiness : As of August, about 75% of the top 50 store-based retailers in the U.S. offered curbside pickup, according to Coresight Research. Anything from a sweater to a book is now as easy to pick up as a sandwich. https://www.nytimes.com/... Connor Ennis / @ennisnyt : “The popularity of curbside pickup reveals that the future of retail is not just more packages piling up on people's doorsteps.” Smart @sapna @mcorkery5 piece on how a pandemic stopgap may have long term effects on the way we shop https://www.nytimes.com/... Sally Shin / @sallyshin : Sure online shopping is great and all but shoppers still miss getting in their cars & they love getting their purchased products handed to them same day. Best Buy, for example, saw $5B in online sales in Q2.. and 41% came from curbside or in-store pickup https://www.nytimes.com/... @dealbook : Beyond satisfying the need for contactless shopping in the pandemic, curbside pickup taps into Americans' desire to drive to a store https://www.nytimes.com/... @nytimesbusiness : Curbside pickup helped fuel Dick's Sporting Goods to a record quarter this summer. Target's version of the service grew by more than 700% in its latest quarter. The shift has been a boon for big-box chains, who expect it to remain popular post-pandemic. https://www.nytimes.com/... @nytimesbusiness : “The rise in curbside pickup, part of a larger surge in e-commerce sales, has implications for preserving retail jobs, though workers' duties are likely to transform. It is also helping to keep brick-and-mortar spaces relevant.” https://www.nytimes.com/... Connor Ennis / @ennisnyt : “Beyond satisfying the need for contactless shopping in the pandemic, it taps into Americans' desire to drive to a store, a pull that can be just as strong as, or even stronger than, the convenience of home delivery” @sapna & @mcorkery5 on curbside pickup https://www.nytimes.com/... @nytimesbusiness : E-commerce sales are surging but Americans aren't getting everything sent to their homes in boxes. A big portion of that is orders for curbside pickup, as people keep hopping in their cars and heading to stores, even if they don't go inside. https://www.nytimes.com/... Sapna Maheshwari / @sapna : Target saw its Drive Up service grow by 700% in its latest quarter (!) experts view curbside as a pandemic behavior shift that will stick. It's changing retail jobs and the nature of shopping and has been a boon for these chains in the fight against Amazon https://www.nytimes.com/... Sapna Maheshwari / @sapna : hope you read our story on how basically every product out there can now be purchased via drive-through https://www.nytimes.com/... Sapna Maheshwari / @sapna : a huge portion of the e-commerce surge at big box chains like Dick's, Target and Best Buy isn't home delivery and boxes... it's curbside pickup, because Americans still like getting in the car and going to the store, even if it's just to pop the trunk https://www.nytimes.com/...
Context & Ripple Effects
This piece lands mid-arc: months earlier, stores that were closing on foot traffic had already begun being turned into online fulfillment centers, and curbside pickup is the customer-facing expression of that flip. The pandemic compressed what would normally be years of channel-shift into months, so by August Coresight counted about 75% of the top 50 store-based retailers offering curbside.
What makes it newsworthy is who benefits: store-rich chains like Target (Drive Up up more than 700%), Best Buy ($5B online sales in Q2, 41% via pickup), and Dick's Sporting Goods (a record quarter) can convert their real estate into a logistics advantage at the exact moment Amazon struggled in its early-pandemic operations.
First-order effects
- Store-based retailers with curbside programs — Target, Best Buy, Dick's — capture surging online demand without shouldarding last-mile shipping costs, while Amazon absorbs operational strain in its delivery-heavy model.
- Retail job duties shift immediately, as store staff take on picking and staging online orders alongside (or instead of) floor service.
Second-order effects
- The picker bottleneck creates a cottage industry of tech tools to make order-fulfillment workers faster, turning store labor efficiency into a competitive market of its own.
- Retailers without a store footprint face pressure to replicate the convenience of drive-up handoff, since 'buy online' alone no longer differentiates against chains that own parking lots.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds, physical stores become permanent fulfillment infrastructure rather than legacy cost centers — a structural advantage that helps explain why US e-commerce's share of retail has since retreated toward pre-pandemic levels even as overall online volume stays elevated.
- Omnichannel capability recomposes the retail moat: scale in logistics matters less than proximity to the customer's car, reordering which retailers can defend share post-pandemic.
The trend: US retail is shifting from a pure e-commerce arms race to an omnichannel contest in which store networks double as fulfillment assets, eroding the delivery-only advantage Amazon once held.