I prefer ordering online and having items delivered to my door but recently I stumbled upon a good deal that did not offer shipping, only in store pickup. I don’t mind picking up online orders at customer service however many times I’ll get stuck behind that one person that takes years to get serviced and have to wait ages. Once it’s your turn you still have to give the employee your order info so they can find it and sometimes that can be a lengthy process as well. Luckily for me Home Depot now offers easy to use order pick up lockers and can skip the lengthy wait at the customer service desk.
This was the first time I’ve ever seen or used them so I didn’t know what to expect but luckily for us they made the whole process simple and user friendly. First of all the lockers are located just inside the entrance so you don’t have to look far to find them. Accessing them is easy and they don’t require any assistance from any employees as it’s completely self serve and help is available from a Human in case you need any, but I found it simple enough not to need any assistance as long as you can read and have basic skills and common sense.
To access your locker, you need to provide your pick up code at the touch screen display and you can either type it in manually or you can have it’s built in camera scan a QR style barcode from your email. It’s very easy to do the barcode scan as you simply open your email on your phone and place the phone’s screen in front of the locker camera and it gathers your info automatically. It then proceeds to open up your locker so you can access your purchase. It opens the locker automatically, all you have to do is find the opened door take your item and close the door and that’s it, simple. At this point you may choose to walk away or submit your pickup experience by rating them on a score of up to five stars similar to Amazon’s rating system (which is completely optional).
This was way easier than waiting in line at the customer service desk and not to mention much faster. I was in and out in probably less than a minute and luckily for me there was no line.
Although I’d still prefer not having to go to the store if I’m just picking up an item and rather have it delivered, at least I won’t find the online order in-store pickup as annoying as it once was since I can skip the customer service desk all together. Big thumbs up to HD!
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That’s an awesome development!
Are these lockers on the inside or outside of the store? It might be nice if it was outside to allow after hours pickup. Looks like a good option but I do wonder about the cost to human jobs in the long run.
The one I visited was on the inside which might actually be better for HD to prevent vandalism.
As far as human jobs go, this will no doubt cut the amount of people needed to run certain operations at the store (just like self service checkout machines cut down on employees at registers) however you can still opt out to pick up at the customer service desk and these lockers do not replace customer service desks all together as the customer service desk is going to be here for things like returns and such.
And remember a human is still required to fill your order and place it in one of these lockers.
If a locker can replace a job, I’m not sure that job had a lot going for it. I understand the concern, though.
I understand your concern, but they will still need employees to get the item and put it in the locker, so I don’t think any jobs will get lost over this, at least not until they figure out a way to get a robot to do this.
Wow this is awesome! I haven’t seen this yet at my Home Depot. Unfortunately the one in my area seems to be really slow at adopting trends that the rest of the stores are participating in. Last night I went to HD to pickup an item that the website said had 7 in stock only to get there and couldn’t find them and one of the employees claim they didn’t have any and I had to order online. I generally don’t order online to pickup because their customer service is usually really slow and it’s usually faster just to go pick it up and use the self checkout if it’s just a single item.