Carrefour and La Poste launch a new type of pedestrian drive

Carrefour has teamed up with La Poste via its subsidiary Pickup to create a new nationwide partnership to launch a new Pedestrian drive business model. Henceforth, customers will be able to visit “Pickup drives”to access several local services – all under the same roof: they’ll be able to pick up their food shopping, as well as picking up or dropping off parcels. The first Pickup drive is set to open this Wednesday (26 May) in Paris’ 19th arrondissement.

Carrefour has entered into an agreement with Pickup to expand its network of food shopping pickup points in France.  Carrefour has already been blazing a trail since it launched its pedestrian drive service in 2018, and now has around a hundred or so such points in France.

For more than 20 years, Pickup – France’s leading pickup network – has been providing people with the opportunity to drop off and collect parcels from locations outside of their home, and recently launched its own first contact points, helping to offset the continuing increase in parcel volumes.

Combining these two activities has given birth to a brand-new concept: the Pickup drive. Located in the town centres of major urban areas, people can pick up all their e-commerce, food and non-food deliveries from such points, all from one convenient location.

Carrefour is opening its first pedestrian drive at a Pickup drive, located at 30 rue de Lorraine in Paris’s 19th arrondissement. It will operate six days a week.

A service for France’s major urban areas

Having launched this first jointly-run site on 26 May, several dozen other sites are set to open across France’s major urban areas. They will be based on the same model – a combination of Carrefour’s Pedestrian Drive service and Pickup’s services.

A partnership geared towards customer satisfaction

Carrefour customers will now be able to pick up the shopping that they order online at Carrefour.fr or via the Carrefour app – the same day that they place their order. They’ll be just a few clicks away from up to 15,000 items for their daily food shops – fruit and vegetables, fresh produce, frozen products, world products and organic and vegetarian products, as well as hygiene and household maintenance products. Every week, they’ll find numerous special offers and will be able to take advantage of the Carrefour loyalty programme benefits.

Customers will also be able to pick up their e-commerce parcels (Colissimo, Chronopost, DPD France) ordered from any one of the 8000 or so e-commerce sites that offer the Pickup away-from-home delivery service (standard parcels and bulky parcels sent via the Maxi Pickup network service). They’ll also be able to drop off parcels that they want sent between two drop-off / pickup points (Shop2Shop by Chronopost), as well as their e-commerce returns.

With this new service, La Poste and Carrefour are joining forces to turn these pickup points into essential service locations in every neighbourhood, making everyday life easier. These locations are catering to the changing purchasing patterns of Carrefour and La Poste customers – they want things to be more digital, more practical and more convenient.

“Carrefour is delighted to be forging this partnership with Pickup. It will help us speed up rollout of our Pedestrian Drive service across the country, and we’ll be able to draw on Pickup’s expertise in managing e-commerce order pickup services in city centres.” Elodie Perthuisot, the Carrefour Group’s Executive Director of E-Commerce, Data and Digital Transformation

“At Pickup, we have very much enjoyed working with Carrefour on launching this new innovative drive concept. Our respective experience and our shared aim of enhancing the quality of the customer experience are what drives us. With the Pickup drive, we are making the lives of our customers easier – they can now pick up all of their online food and non-food purchases – right next to where they live.” Paul-Ambroise Archambeaud, CEO of Pickup