Speaking at the Digital Food & Beverage Conference in Austin,Texas, Albertsons’ vice president of e-commerce marketing and merchandising, Kenji Gjovig, said that the company is testing a subscription/delivery service in about a dozen of its stores, and plans to expand it after seeing "off the charts" results.
There are a lot of decisions still to be made about the service - like its name, whether there should be an order minimum, and what the pricing should be. But Gjovig said that the company is “seeing a dramatic increase in frequency — above where our forecast was, and an increase in profitability as well across the two cohorts in the annual and the monthly subscribers.”
There are a lot of decisions still to be made about the service - like its name, whether there should be an order minimum, and what the pricing should be. But Gjovig said that the company is “seeing a dramatic increase in frequency — above where our forecast was, and an increase in profitability as well across the two cohorts in the annual and the monthly subscribers.”
- KC's View:
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I got all excited when I saw these quotes because I thought, for a brief moment, that maybe Albertsons was getting into the subscription business, wading into a battle that to this point has been dominated by Amazon’s Subscribe & Save.
I was hoping.
But nope. That’s not what it is doing … it is, instead, offering subscriptions to its delivery services that allow frequent users to save on fees. Which is good, to be sure … but it isn’t as potentially game-changing as the other kind of subscription service would be, which would at least create the possibility of extended loyalty to Albertsons and its brand partners and keeping some of the packaged goods sales that may be going elsewhere.
Can we keep hope alive, folks?
