Macy’s Continues Testing Of Lockers

While lockers are often associated with Amazon and Whole Foods, Macy’s has been using lockers for a buy-online-pickup-in-store program. The retailer is continuing to test the lockers through an installation at a New Jersey store per a tweet from a Fortune writer, industry news source Chain Store Age reported.

Shoppers can find the lockers adjacent to the retailer’s “At Your Service” counter at the New Jersey location. Macy’s is no stranger to locker installations: In November, shoppers reportedly saw the lockers at a location in Chicago, and the retailer has added lockers to a few of its other stores, Crain’s Chicago Business reported.

To open the lockers, consumers scan a QR code on a receipt that Macy’s e-mails to them. To encourage this shopping behavior, the retailer offers customers who use the service a 20 percent discount offer to use on their next visit, per Business Insider.

The news comes as research from inMarket suggests that Amazon’s lockers may be encouraging shoppers to make quick trips to Whole Foods stores: “Micro” visits — or those between three and five minutes — increased 11 percent at Whole Foods stores that had the lockers compared to a 7 percent rise in stores without lockers since last August, Reuters reported.

Beyond Whole Foods stores, Amazon is also installing lockers in thousands of apartment buildings across the nation. According to an October report in The Wall Street Journal, Amazon has signed contracts with apartment owners and managers representing more than 850,000 units across the U.S. to begin installing locker systems in their buildings. Several of the nation’s largest operators, including AvalonBay Communities Inc., Equity Residential, Greystar and The Bozzuto Group, have already signed up.

Hub by Amazon will accept packages from all carriers, even for orders not placed on Amazon. The lockers will be available only to residents, who will receive a notification when they have a package, along with a code to retrieve it. The locker program could also help landlords handle the volume of packages received each day, which can take several hours to sort.