Amazon lockers encourage more ‘micro-visits’ at Whole Foods stores: Report

Amazon.com lockers are boosting traffic at Whole Foods stores as more customers pop in to pick up online orders, according to CNBC. These brief "micro-visits" (lasting anywhere between three minutes and five minutes) were up by 11 percent at the 98 stores equipped with the lockers since Amazon's August acquisition of the supermarket chain, according to a report from consumer research firm InMarket. By comparison, other Whole Foods stores in those same cities but lacking the lockers saw micro-visits increase by only 7 percent.

InMarket studied stores in the Atlanta, Boston, Chicago, Dallas–Fort Worth, Houston, Los Angeles, New York City, Philadelphia, San Francisco and District of Columbia metro areas. Roughly 16 percent of the chain's nearly 500 stores have these lockers.

"There's a serendipity and immediacy to the in-store experience," said InMarket founder and CEO Todd Dipaola. "As good as delivery is getting — one-day delivery, sometimes one-hour delivery — that still can't compete with the one-second immediacy of being in-store and picking up that avocado that I'm about to make guacamole out of because I thought about it in that moment."