Fortune
The CEO of the 12th largest U.S. retailer thinks self-checkout is worth it despite theft: ‘Savings on labor costs are higher than the potential downsides’
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Courtesy of Ahold Delhaize
Phil Wahba
Mon, December 18, 2023 at 3:14 PM GMT+1
In late 2020, the grocery behemoth Ahold Delhaize announced it would buy online food retailer FreshDirect. At the time, the Netherlands-based owner of large U.S. supermarket chains such as Stop & Shop and Food Lion said the deal would help build its e-commerce muscle and give it an inroad into New York City's fast-growing online food-shopping market.
Alas, that boost to its business was not to be. Ahold Delhaize, the 12th largest U.S. retailer with $60 billion in sales in 2023, announced last month that it was selling FreshDirect to grocery delivery service Getir after less than three years, bowing to the cutthroat grocery e-commerce market. Ahold Delhaize is No. 25 on the Fortune 500 Europe list.
That's not to say CEO Frans Muller is giving up on building the company's digital business. Rather, he believes the FreshDirect misfire demonstrates that e-commerce can better succeed, and make a profit, if fully integrated into Ahold Delhaize's physical stores business as more shoppers gravitate toward online pickup or grocery delivery services like Instacart.
"Customers like to combine two kinds of shopping experiences in one brand, in-store and online. The FreshDirect experience tells us that if we use our existing staff in stores to take care of online orders, that is a more profitable route," Muller told Fortune after a media tour in late November of a Giant food store in downtown Philadelphia showcasing its store remodels. It's a strategy already successfully deployed by Walmart, whose grocery e-commerce business, aided by a fleet of thousands of stores equipped for curbside pickup, was already 35% larger than Amazon's in 2023, according to a recent report by Insider Intelligence. That lead should grow to about 50% next year.
Pursuing profitable growth is key at a time when inflation and trading down are hurting grocers, which have notoriously small profit margins compared to other retailers. (Muller is still a big fan of self-checkout despite the rise in shoplifting.) That the FreshDirect deal was a dud has not dampened his appetite for dealmaking but has clarified what kinds of deals to pursue, says the Dutchman. "We have to be very focused on what we truly believe in and what we can do well."
Bron: yahoo