Sears has Everything!
Mid-June and Sears announces grocery delivery through their mygofer.com site. Initial delivery can be found in New York City and the Hamptons in Long Island.
Pretty ironic move from a number of perspectives.
- Grocery has not been the strong suit of Sears or K-Mart in…well in forever. I can remember their regular K-Mart grocery stores way back when I was a wee lad in Evansville, Indiana. Pretty much dead last in the food chain of food chains!
- Sears and K-mart have not had much to crow about since their combination some years back from the standpoint of innovation in merchandising or meeting consumer needs.
- Still, from a legacy standpoint, Sears was long dominant in the home delivery business, with demand generated by their catalogue many years ago. They delivered everything from underwear to houses at one time or another.
- One of the early pioneers in web-catalogues and home delivery was Lands End, which was eventually purchased by Sears and folded into their overall web applications.
Overall a good move. They understand the role groceries play in the consumer’s life and the impact of having consumers tied out to them via multiple touch-points in an intimate fashion 1.5+ times per week. However, like so many others they do not understand the key elements necessary to win consumers, and more importantly keep customers in the online grocery world. The Mygofer.com site is simply not built to accomplish either of these goals, and the lack of fresh thinking about bringing in real expertise is uncomfortably familiar.
They will need to do some serious rethinking to get this right. But, the guys that do??? That will be a powerful entity.