Business Insider/Hayley Peterson
- Walmart is adding automated pickup towers for online orders to more than 500 stores.
- The towers retrieve online orders in a matter of seconds.
Walmart is adding online pickup towers to more than 500 stores.
The massive towers, which stand at least 16 feet tall and 8 feet wide, rapidly retrieve online orders for customers who shipped their purchases to a Walmart store.
Business Insider/Hayley Peterson
"Think of this as an ATM for parcel pickup," JP Suarez, Walmart's vice president of real estate, said at a recent conference, according to Bisnow Houston. "We're putting 500 of these towers in our stores, we love them."
The towers are game-changers for online order pickups.
When Business Insider tested them out in August, we were in and out of the store in under one minute with packages in tow.
Customers don't have to interact with employees to use the machines. They enter an order number or scan a barcode on their phones, and the package appears in a matter of seconds.
Walmart tested the first pickup tower in a store in Bentonville, Arkansas - where the company is headquartered - last year.