Sears Begins Grocery Deliveries

Sears Holding Corp. has added delivery of groceries to its Internet shopping services, according to local press reports. Over the Memorial Day weekend, the Hoffman Estates, Ill.-based retailer quietly expanded its year-old MyGofer online shopping portal to include home delivery service of groceries, as well as prescriptions, electronics and other goods, to Manhattan and the Hamptons in the metropolitan New York area.

The service — which delivers items from the company’s Kmart stores — is scheduled to arrive in Chicago and other markets this summer.

Sears launched MyGofer last year as a way to combine bricks-and-mortar retailing with Amazon-style online shopping. MyGofer.com allows shoppers to search goods online, place orders from a computer or iPhone and pick them up at a Kmart store in as little as two hours, without getting out of their cars. Sears also converted a shuttered Kmart store in Joliet, Ill., into a warehouse and showroom with a drive-through and renamed it MyGofer. Opened a year ago, the store is the only one of its kind.

Sears’ home-delivery plans appeared as part of a video highlighting its online prowess during a keynote address at a trade show at Chicago’s McCormick Place on Wednesday, according to published reports. “Customers are looking for instant gratification,” said Imran Jooma, the company’s SVP for e-commerce. “They want it today. They want it now.”

Meanwhile, plans for expanding MyGofer inside Kmart stores are moving ahead, though the company wouldn’t comment on the chances of another MyGofer store.

Sears Holdings reportedly generated an estimated $3 billion in online sales in 2009, making it the eighth-largest online retailer. Sears’ annual revenue fell 5.8 percent to about $44 billion last year.
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