Oh, my goodness, people!  Guess what?  Today I tried Walmart’s new grocery pickup service, and although they aren’t paying me to say this, I must say it was a really great experience!

I recently noticed that one end of our local Walmart building had been painted bright orange, and (since I’m not much of an orange fan) I was curious to find out what it was all about!

It’s a new service that Walmart is rolling out across the country.  You order your regular groceries online the day before you need them, tell them what time you want to pick them up, your “personal shopper” gathers your items for you (doesn’t that sound cool?) and voila! you get an email when they’re ready!  Go, park your car by the orange side of the building, use the app (or you can call) to tell them you’re there and they’ll bring your groceries right out to your car.  They’ll even load it all in the trunk for you.

Can you even imagine how much of a time saver this is?   Oh my goodness… no more wandering aisle after aisle every single week with the kidlets in tow.   This is awesome!   The best part is, it’s all for the low, low, price of only 24.99 a month!!  No really, it’s free.  Totally free.  Sweet deal, eh?    To be fair, I was kinda skeptical of the whole thing at first.  I mean, surely they raised the online prices to pay for the “free” program, right?  It doesn’t look that way from what I could tell, there weren’t any huge price differences compared to what I’d been paying in the store.  The only “catch” that I could figure out, was that your order has to be at least $30.  I don’t know about you, but our family of 5 spends that on groceries a week, easy, so this one is no biggie.

I have tried a program similar to this a few years ago with another national-chain grocery store here in town, and the results were pretty dismal. They picked incorrect items, I was overcharged by more than $30.00, they had a hard time understanding that when I ordered bananas that I didn’t want just one and not a regular bunch of them, (really!) And then it took them 30 minutes after I’d arrived in the store to even locate my order, and they were very reluctant to refund me for the overcharges, and then they told me the refunds of those overcharges were a “one-time only thing!”  You bet it was, I never went back.  Not to mention I had to pay for the privilege!  So after that experience, I was a little leery of trying out this new program of Walmart’s… but it was great!  No complaints!

Walmart even has a policy that if they run out of a particular item between the time you order and the time your personal shopper goes to pick it up, they will give you a substituted similar item.  If the substituted item costs more than your original item, you get it at whichever is the lower price.  I had three items that needed substituting.  On each of them, I had selected the generic Walmart brand and ended up coming home with the name brand item for the generic price.  Score! 😉

The Walmart Savings Catcher program still works with Grocery Pickup as well, so if any of your local stores has an item for sale that you’ve already bought at Walmart, they will refund you the difference.  Take a look at my post about Savings Catcher and Ibotta if you’re not familiar with how it works.

All in all, we definitely had a positive experience.  I hear that some stores will even give you a bag of various free sample items if they find out it’s your first time ordering.  (Ours didn’t, but that’s okay, the positive experience made up for it!)

And lastly, they also have a referral program that sounds pretty good.  If you refer a friend, you both get a $10 off coupon to use on a $50 or more order.  Who doesn’t like free money?  Try it here!