Beyond the Cart: How to Save the In-Store Grocery Experience in the Digital Age

You walk into a grocery store after a long day at work. Your list has ten items, but aisle four feels like a maze, your usual pasta is nowhere in sight, and the checkout line reaches back to the frozen foods. The trip was supposed to be quick. Every extra minute makes the next trip somewhere else more likely.

Shoppers have not given up on the store. The job is making the physical trip as easy as the digital one.

Do shoppers still want the in-store experience?

They do. FMI’s 2026 U.S. Grocery Shopper Trends found that 54% of grocery shoppers always shop in-store at their primary store. The same research found that 71% are digitally engaged while they shop, and 54% use retailer apps on their phones in the aisle.

Shoppers walk in expecting the store and the app to work as one thing. Our earlier piece on how mobile rewired grocery retail covers how that expectation formed.

Where does friction show up in a grocery trip?

In our view, the real competitor of the traditional grocery store is not e-commerce. It is friction. Customers carry the ease of their favorite apps into the aisles, and the store often does not match it:

• An app that does not match the shelf. It lists an item the store does not have, or hides one that is there.
• Aisles that are hard to read. In FMI’s research, 69% of shoppers want to find aisles and departments easily.
• Staff pulled off the floor. Employees counting stock in the backroom are not helping customers.
• Long checkout lines. The wait at the end of a trip is the part shoppers remember.

When the digital experience does not talk to the physical one, shoppers take their loyalty elsewhere.

How can mobile checkout shorten the trip?

Scan-and-go lets customers scan items with their phones as they shop and pay in the app, so the line disappears. In a survey of 1,044 U.S. consumers by NCR Voyix, a checkout technology vendor, 77% of the shoppers who prefer self-checkout said they do so because it is faster. The same survey found that 60% of shoppers who do not use self-checkout would be more inclined to if it were easier with more than 15 items.

Because a vendor ran the survey, read it as a signal of shopper preference, not a measure of results at any one store. We design mobile checkout and in-app experiences for retailers, and we would start with the basket sizes your shoppers actually carry.

Can the app guide shoppers to what they need?

It can, but we would treat it as a later step. In-app mapping that leads a shopper to the exact item, with a relevant promotion when they reach it, only works when the app knows what is on the shelf. Built on stale counts, it sends people to empty spots.

What do store employees need from the app?

Staff tools matter as much as the shopper-facing ones. For Hy-Vee’s Fast & Fresh app, which serves the company’s convenience and fuel locations, we built curbside ordering where the customer sends an arrival notification and a store-side tool tells employees which order is waiting. Orders reach the people who fill them without anyone watching a screen at the counter.

Picture a grocery store that applies the same idea to shelves: an employee gets an alert when a product runs low and goes straight to it, instead of walking the store to find out. That is a hypothetical, not a project we have shipped, but it is the direction we would take.

What should grocers fix first?

Grocery does not have to choose between physical and digital. Both need to work from the same information. We would fix things in this order:

1. Make inventory accurate. Every other tool depends on it.
2. Shorten checkout. Start with the line, the most visible friction in the trip.
3. Equip staff. Give frontline workers tools that bring work to them.
4. Add navigation and offers. These work once the data under them is right.

If you are weighing where to start, talk to us about your stores.