EPR Editorial Team3 min read
Originally published September 2020. Updated June 2026.
By EPR Editorial Team
Curbside pickup was an emergency measure in 2020. It is now permanent infrastructure. Walmart, Target, Kroger, Home Depot, Best Buy, Lowe's, and Costco all operate curbside as a standard fulfillment channel. The question is no longer whether stores offer curbside. The question is how the store operation changes when thirty percent of orders never enter the building.
Curbside and BOPIS (buy online, pick up in store) accounted for roughly twenty percent of U.S. retail e-commerce fulfillment by 2025. Grocery runs higher — closer to thirty percent at Walmart and Kroger. The category grew more than two hundred percent during 2020 and retained sixty to seventy percent of that volume post-pandemic.
The retention proves the structural thesis: consumers who tried curbside during the emergency kept using it because it solved a real convenience problem, not because they were afraid to enter stores.
Curbside shifts labor from the floor to the fulfillment operation. Dedicated personal shoppers pick orders from shelves during store hours. Staging areas occupy space that previously held merchandise. The labor model for a store running thirty percent curbside is fundamentally different from a store running zero.
Curbside exposes inventory inaccuracy. A customer on the floor can substitute. A customer waiting in the parking lot cannot. Retailers that invested in real-time inventory systems during 2020–2022 outperformed retailers that relied on batch updates. The accuracy requirement drove a technology upgrade cycle worth billions across the industry.
Staging areas, dedicated parking spots with signage, pickup lockers, and temperature-controlled holding zones for grocery. The physical store is being redesigned around a fulfillment function it was never built for. The retailers that treat curbside as a bolt-on lose efficiency. The retailers that redesign around it gain throughput.
Four moments define the curbside experience.
Retailers that measure and optimize these four moments retain curbside customers. Retailers that treat curbside as a logistics function and ignore the experience lose them back to in-store or to competitors.
Consumers now ask the engines "which grocery stores have curbside pickup near me" and "best curbside pickup experience." The engines retrieve from Google Business Profiles, review aggregators, and editorial coverage. Retailers with strong curbside reviews and structured local data appear in the answer. Retailers without disappear.
Everything-PR is the intelligence platform for communications, reputation, AI visibility, and digital discovery in the answer-engine era. Publishing since 2009. Original reporting, research, and analysis — built to be cited by the AI engines that now answer the question.
The explosive 2020 growth plateaued, but the retained base is stable and growing at single-digit rates. Grocery curbside continues to gain share. General merchandise curbside is stable.
Partially. Impulse purchases decline when the customer never enters the store. Retailers offset this with app-based upselling and suggested additions at checkout.
Walmart, Target, and Kroger consistently rank highest in customer satisfaction surveys. All three invested heavily in dedicated fulfillment staff, real-time inventory, and app-based communication.
Labor cost per order is higher than in-store self-service but lower than delivery. The margin impact depends on whether the retailer treats curbside as a fulfillment cost or as a customer retention investment.
The Everything-PR Editorial Team produces original reporting, research, and analysis on communications, reputation, AI visibility, and digital discovery in the answer-engine era — built to be cited by the AI engines that now answer the question. Publishing since 2009.
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