This weekend, Stop & Shop plans to hold a spate of hiring events across its trade area to boost the workforce for its Peapod online grocery warerooms.
Quincy, Mass.-based Stop & Shop said Monday that it aims to hire more than 250 part-time associates to fill positions in 20 of the warerooms to help support its expanding grocery pickup and delivery services. Job fairs are scheduled on Saturday, Sept. 21, from 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. at 20 stores in Connecticut, Massachusetts, New York and Rhode Island to fill open positions, including drivers and clerks.
The part-time positions provide for 12 to 28 hours of work weekly. Part-time staff get competitive pay, paid training, flexible schedules, a company discount, paid time off and career advancement opportunities, Stop & Shop said. The company added that it fills 80% of its open positions by promoting from within.
“Stop & Shop strives to provide excellent customer service to all of the people we serve, whether it’s in-store or online,” Dean Wilkinson, e-commerce lead at Stop & Shop, said in a statement. “These Peapod wareroom positions are vital to ensuring that our new and expanding pickup and delivery services are successful.”
This year, Stop & Shop plans to add 175 new click-and-collect sites that will enable customers to pick up Peapod orders at stores in as soon as four hours.
Overall, Stop & Shop has 21 warerooms and more than 400 stores. Recent wareroom additions include markets where Stop & Shop has upgraded stores to its latest format. During fiscal 2018, for example, Peapod boosted its order delivery capacity by 10% in metropolitan New York with the opening of its fifth wareroom on Long Island, a 10,000-square-foot facility at the Stop & Shop in East Northport. Last week, the chain opened 21 refreshed stores on the island.
Last fall, Stop & Shop launched its first micro-fulfillment center in Hartford, Conn. — where it also opened 21 remodels stores — and is slated to build several more in 2019, with additional expansion in 2020. The facility leverages parent company Ahold Delhaize’s partnership with Waltham, Mass.-based Takeoff Technologies, which is providing automation and robotics to pick and assemble online grocery orders in a fraction of the time and space of a manual e-commerce operation.
Today, Takeoff announced the closing of another $25 million in venture capital funding, lifting total funds raised to date to $86 million. The company said it also unveiled version 2.0 of its micro-fulfillment solution. The upgrade, to be rolled out next year, brings a smaller, cleaner design of the facility’s floor space — enabling easier construction and installation — and 6% faster order picking, plus more storage capacity. Besides Ahold Delhaize, other retail grocery partners include Albertsons Cos., Wakefern Food Corp. and Sedano’s in the United States and Woolworths in Australia.