Piggly Wiggly Picks MyWebGrocer to Do What Wegmans Has Done All Along
by
on April 10, 2008,
If it wasn't for Carla Thompson's Tweet this morning, the announcement that Piggly Wiggly had selected MyWebGrocer to provide an interactive weekly circular, online shopping list, personalized marketing, advertising, social networking, and full-sale online grocery shopping for 10 stores would have completely escaped my notice. And when it comes to press releases, I can see why; instead of touting full-sale online shopping (as it should have), it showcases the buzzwords of "online shopping list" and "social networking." Welcome to the 21st century, Piggly Wiggly!
Those of us old enough to have actually experienced the Web 1.0 boom and subsequent bust remember the hope everyone had for Webvan. Amazon has revived the idea with Amazon Fresh, and I can tell you that if one of my local grocery chains would do full-sale online shopping, they'd win the most loyal customer ever.
However, in showing just how far they lag, Piggly Wiggly promotes the online shopping lists and social networking services that will be provided by MyWebGrocer as newsworthy, when they should hang their heads that it's taken this long to offer a decent version of those services at all. We are talking about a 110-store chain here, not some small-scale operation.
Maybe I've been spoiled, but I live in the land of Wegmans, which may be one of the most, if not the most, innovative grocery store chains in the U.S. Customers have had online shopping lists and recipe boxes for years on the Wegmans site, and if you enter which location you are going to take your list to, it will print the list broken down by aisle. Change stores from week to week? Reset the store before you print and it will re-associate aisles for the products you are purchasing.
I joked to Carla when I saw her Tweet that nothing would make my day more than to see Piggly Wiggly adding something like a social network, and that's exactly what they are doing. We've apparently reached that oversaturation point, where even a grocery store chain feels they can use a social network. Maybe to discuss the newfangled online shopping lists?
Wegmans doesn't need a social network; they have over 200 groups dedicated to the store and related topics on Facebook . The group "We {Heart} Wegmans" has over 10,000 members talking about the store, many of whom lived in an area with a Wegmans store and moved away.
As a Wegmans customer, I can refill my prescriptions, find recipes, create grocery lists, find recall information, plan a party, view videos of cooking techniques, access a wellness program, view the weekly ad flyer, and browse the store, and I've been able to do all that for quite some time. If Amazon Fresh really takes off, I woudn't be surprised to see Wegmans add full-sale online shopping, because they are generally at the forefront of grocery trends.
Piggly Wiggly might want to watch the Wegmans site more closely. They'd be able to keep up with technology a bit better if they did.
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Svetlana Gladkova
John Phelps
Opensource 
Michael Fidler 
What?
Could you please make sense? At the beginning you say PW needs get with the 21st century. Then at the end you say Wegmans MAY soon offer online grocery shopping, yet PW is starting OGS with this program!
So the real question is; Cyndy, what is your wegman’s employee number?
I’m not a Wegmans employee, merely a customer, but you might have wanted to disclose your employer, “Sir Shop-a-lot” since you are posting from a MyWebGrocer account, don’t you agree?
The point that I was making (which I’m pretty sure made sense) is that Piggly Wiggly is so out of touch with innovation that instead of making a huge deal out of the pilot program for full-sale online shopping (which is only at 10 of the 110 stores, I might add), the press release leads with the other features, burying the full-sale text at the very end of the paragraph.
This is a textbook case of a press release gone wrong. It mentions Piggly Wiggly’s “pioneering spirit” in adopting web services other grocery chains have had for years, and full-sale online shopping that was actually “pioneered” by companies like Webvan back in the late 1990s and early 2000s.
Now, either Piggly Wiggly (and by association, MyWebGrocer) had no idea of prior history with full-sale online grocery shopping, or they are hoping that their customers don’t. But both companies should have expected that those in the tech sector remember well, and are wondering if it’s possible to fix what was broken the last time this was attempted.