Will Walmart Follow Sam’s Club In Charging For Grocery Pickup?
It was just over a month ago that Sam's Club started charging a flat $4 fee per order for anything members wished to pick up outside the store. How long will it be until Walmart does the same?
Grocery pickup has been a popular option even before the 2020 pandemic, though I'm guessing covid had a lot to do with how popular it has become. The Quannah Parker and Sheridan Walmarts have both expanded their designated pickup areas in the last year, when will the flat fees emerge per order too?
If you look around the Walmart website, the information they provide on the grocery pickup service is pretty basic and simple. They still say the service is offered free of charge, and there's no hidden markup on the items you order to split the difference.
But things were much the same at Sam's Club when they first started offering the pickup service years ago. Now it's only free for members that purchase premium memberships, changing the verbiage on the website to insist free pickup was a limited-time option for normies.
All the same, the pickup rules are different for both of these stores.
At Walmart, you must place a minimum order amount of $35 before your pickup option is free. If you don't need $35 worth of groceries but still want the pickup option, Walmart charges $6.99 for the convenience, meaning it's not actually free... it just becomes free at a certain point.
Alternatively, Sam's Club doesn't have an order minimum for grocery pickup. I used mine mostly because I didn't want to have to walk all the way to the back of the store to get bottled water. I'd order five cases at a time, and when a case was still $2.50, my total order was less than $15 delivered to my car. Perhaps this is what Sam's wants to avoid, small orders and such.
My last order was over $100 so that $4 pickup fee dilutes in the overall total. Maybe that's the angle Walmart works on too, spend enough and pickup is free... So there's technically a $7 fee, but it becomes free with any order over $35.
Still, tacking on a small additional charge sounds like a big-business thing... Don't be surprised if it happens.