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Regional retail heavyweight Meijer Inc. is rolling out home-delivery grocery service in the Indianapolis area, the Grand Rapids, Michigan-based company announced Thursday.
Meijer, which has about about a dozen superstores in the area, said it will offer the service beginning April 13 through outside vendor Shipt Inc., a Birmingham, Alabama-based company founded in 2014 that offers delivery service in 35 cities.
The service will be offered to customers who purchase a $99 annual membership. Members will get unlimited deliveries on grocery orders of $35 or more. Those orders won’t include a delivery fee, but there will be an upcharge on the products.
That upcharge is expected to be about 14 percent, which means customers will pay about $35 for an order that would have cost about $30 in the store.
Meijer said customers can schedule orders seven days a week, 24 hours a day, to be delivered in a little as one hour. About 55,000 items will be offered through the service.
The orders can be made online or through a Shipt smartphone app. Members won’t be able to use Meijer’s popular mPerks discount program on the deliveries, but the retailer said it hopes to be able to link the two services in the future.
Almost every store in the Indianapolis area will be included, but a Meijer spokesman could not immediately provide a list of participating stores.
Shipt and Meijer began offering home delivery at 25 stores in the Detroit and southeastern Michigan area in September after Meijer tested delivery at two stores in Grand Rapids with a different vendor.
Meijer now plans to offer the service throughout its six-state footprint beginning with the entire Grand Rapids area March 29, followed by the Indianapolis and Fort Wayne areas two weeks later.
Officials for the 230-store chain called the Detroit-area rollout a “highly successful launch,” with Shipt making more than 65,000 deliveries.
Shipt founder and CEO Bill Smith said the expansion of the service to all of Meijer’s markets is expected to create 10,000 jobs as the company hires personal shoppers, delivery personnel and sales personnel to market the service.
Other retailers in the Indianapolis area, including Marsh Supermarkets, Whole Foods Market, Petco, Georgetown Market and Costco, offer home-delivery service through Instacart.
Online grocers such as locally-based Green Bean Delivery and Chicago-based Peapod offer delivery-only services.
Kroger and Wal-Mart also offer online ordering, but requires customers to pick up their own orders. Meijer has a similar service.
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