Quote:
Originally Posted by buzzg
Sobeys is expanding its Voila delivery service to all of the GTA, and other places in the future. All orders are fulfilled in a robotic warehouse, then delivered to customers. Only a matter of time before we see grocery stores scale down here.
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The Winnipeg Sobey's warehouse did a massive expansion in support of the being the supply chain to Target Canada's grocery department. Granted since that time Sobey's also acquired Safeway and merged warehouse operations to the Sobey's warehouse but there could still be excess capacity to build out the automated fulfilment center locally.
As I have said many times, the goal posts are moving fairly rapidly in the grocery space and it no longer makes sense to have 30,000+ sq ft stores spammed across a market trying to catch the last-mile service. Those could easily be cut to 10,000 sq ft or less pickup locations or even more ideal home delivery. The other possibility that
may come from this is a rise of independent butchers and bakeries that act as fulfilment pickup locations. Order all your packaged foods to the pickup location and stop in for a selection of fresh meats/baked goods. That model could even seen current grocery stores stay as pickup locations with leased out spaces to independent butchers/bakers.
Again it is all about maximizing those tiny margins and minimizing shrink, especially due to retail theft. It is a big part of why FreshCo has contracted out the meat department, someone else takes the loss for theft of meat.