Some jobs could disappear during the next years due to the technology, and some of these affected workers are the pickers. The automatization of picking and other logistic processes offers fewer errors, better inventory control, more fluid information and, of course, fewer labor costs. The automatization reduces the need for hiring workers and jobs like pickers could be in danger. However, time changes and, with it, jobs are evolving quickly, transforming the way we understand them.  Pickers can have a new life outside the warehouses becoming “personal shoppers”, a new kind of picker that has appeared a few years ago thanks to the e-grocery. Today we will discover how they have reinvented themselves.

E-Grocery, a job opportunity for pickers

Lola Market is one of the actors in this field who has changed totally how we understand the work of a picker, transferring them from the warehouses to the supermarkets and giving them another dimension.

How it works? Through an app or webpage, the customer can select different markets or supermarkets and the products that offer each supermarket, combining them in a single order if they wish. Later, the customer chooses the time when he wants to receive the order, and if he selects more than one supermarket, he will receive at the same time, more or less, the products from each supermarket by different personal shoppers, who go to every chosen supermarket and pick up the selected products.

Functions: personal shoppers more than pickers

This business model would mean nothing without the personal shoppers, who are the main actors and the crucial part of the service. Through them, the company performs a customer-centric strategy, where “pickers” carry out customer support:

• Clients can add products that don’t appear in the inventory of the e-grocery giving a note to the personal shopper, who personally will find these products.
• In case of replacement of a product, because there is no stock, the personal shopper can keep in touch with the client to offer other alternatives.
• Thanks to the personal shoppers, customers can buy fresh products and obtain them in one hour, service that doesn’t offer supermarkets within their deliveries.

In the video below (it is in Spanish) you can watch a sample of this kind of service and how a personal shopper works picking products from the supermarkets.