Getting groceries delivered to your home is not new. I was doing it for Food Time supermarket 50 years ago. But what about having someone you don’t know come into your house to put away the food?
Walmart is doing just that. It announced Friday that it’s testing a so-called straight into your fridge service — and you can watch it happen on your phone thanks to cameras installed in your house.
Walmart partnered with smart security company August Home, which makes locks that you can monitor on your smart phone. August Home reached out to customers in Silicon Valley to find people willing to sign up for the delivery service.
The customers taking part in the trial can buy products from Walmart.com, including groceries. Once the order is placed, a driver from the crowdsourced, same-day delivery startup Deliv, goes to pick up the items.
If you aren’t home when the driver rings the doorbell, the Deliv driver will receive a one-time passcode for the August smart lock that was already authorized by the customer. The Walmart customer will also be notified when the doorbell rings so they can watch on the August doorbell cam.
The August app also links to other cameras that may be installed in the house, like those from Google/Alphabet-owned Nest, so that consumer can watch the driver drop off packages and even put the food away in the kitchen.
Once the driver leaves, the door locks automatically. Walmart noted that the Deliv drivers know they can be monitored by the customer and that any reported incidents will be addressed.
Here’s a video showing how it works.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8bOuVjbcTgs
A service like this would have been unheard of for any retailer, let alone one as large and traditional as Walmart, just a few years ago. Some people may still draw the line at letting a driver in their home while they are away.
We’re living in an age where many consumers don’t think twice about getting rides from strangers on Uber, asking people on TaskRabbit to do mundane things like their laundry and letting someone they’ve never met before stay in their home through Airbnb.
What do you think? Is Walmart’s new service cool or creepy?
