The Fourth Wave of Convenience

Think “beyond the box”—that’s the mantra in retail today. How can retailers grow sales beyond the physical box that is their store, whether through delivery or curbside pickup, tying it all together with internet and app ordering and payment?

While these conveniences may still feel new, in many respects they have been around for decades or even centuries. The key to determining which of these so-called pivots will gain further traction and grow in popularity—or even spin off new conveniences—will hinge on consumer demand and retailer execution.

So let’s take a look back—to ultimately look ahead—to see how convenience has evolved in three distinct waves, with each one coming twice as fast as the previous one. And the fourth wave is already underway.

Wave 1: Home Delivery

Whether it’s for food or merchandise, home delivery has been around for centuries.

Milk delivery was introduced in Vermont in 1785, when milkmen traveled through neighborhoods with essentially a giant vat of milk and residents would use any containers they had handy to fill up. It was more than a century until the milk bottle was patented in 1878. Eventually insulated containers would be brought in for the milkman to deliver milk and other products directly to a subscriber’s doorstep.

Mail-order delivery in the United States goes back even further and was founded by one of the country’s Founding Fathers before he turned his attention to the country’s independence. Benjamin Franklin created the mail-order catalog in 1744, offering book delivery to people’s homes—the same concept Jeff Bezos used to create Amazon 250 years later. Over the next century, other specialty catalogues sold seeds or other items for home delivery.

The general interest catalog was introduced in 1872 by Montgomery Ward, and Sears Roebuck perfected the offer. It was once possible to buy a house through the Sears catalog: Everything to build the house, including nails and other fasteners, was sent to your home—or at least the location of your new home.

Then there’s food delivery. The first pizza “delivery” took place in 1889 in Italy when Queen Margherita of Savoy, who was tired of the local cuisine while on travel, asked a nearby restaurant to prepare traditional Italian food and bring it to where she was staying. That first delivery included a special pizza that featured the colors of the Italian flag: red (sauce), white (mozzarella cheese) and green (basil leaves), which then became known as a Margherita pizza.

Delivery to commoners was not common for a few more decades. The Kin-Chu café in Los Angeles was an early entrant, offering delivery in 1922. But it was the booming economy following World War II that made delivery a trend, and New York City pizzerias began offering call-in pickup pizzas. In Los Angeles, a few restaurants introduced pizza delivery, a practice that picked up nationally around 1960, the same year that Domino’s opened its first location in Michigan.

The strong postwar economy helped spur the suburbs’ growth in the 1960s, but the greater distances for travel between customers made traditional milk delivery from a central dairy location cost-inefficient. Wawa Dairy Farms, then a 150-year-old dairy company, needed another distribution option for its milk and opened its first convenience store in 1964, now known as Wawa Food Market.

Wave 2: Delivery Services to Vehicles

The invention of the automobile created a second place for Americans beyond their homes. It ushered in the second wave of last-mile delivery—to the car, beginning with fuel.

Karl Benz invented the first gasoline-powered automobile in 1885; however, fueling the first models was inconvenient. Early fueling sites were a patchwork of pharmacies—many vehicles ran on ethanol—or ramshackle sheds and blacksmiths’ shops.

This early method for refueling changed in December 1913 when Gulf Refining Company opened the nation’s first drive-up service station in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, designed and built specifically to sell fuel. Attendants wore crisp, white uniforms and provided a full-service experience for drivers. Eventually, the service stations specialized in TBA: tires, batteries and accessories.

Like any new idea, a true gas station took time before consumers fully embraced the concept. That Gulf station only sold 30 gallons of fuel on its first day.

In 1913, the total number of vehicles on the road first topped one million. While cars were becoming affordable, they still were a major purchase and car owners wanted to keep their expensive new purchases in tip-top shape and looking new. And a year later, the first car wash, the Automobile Laundry, opened in Detroit with workers washing, rinsing and drying cars.

In 1921, a Texas barbecue joint called Kirby’s Pig Stand pioneered the concept of delivery to the car. Parking spots surrounded the building on all four sides, and the servers brought food to people in their cars. It took nearly 20 years for someone to coin the term carhop, which is a mashup of car and bellhop.

White Castle introduced a different level of convenience with its carryout sack in 1927. The drive-thru didn’t debut until 1948, when In-N-Out Burger in California introduced an ordering system for its burgers, fries and drinks via an intercom and pickup at a window.

Ultimately, convenience stores may not have flourished without one innovation: self-service grocery shopping. Before 1916, grocery shoppers presented their orders to clerks, who gathered the goods from store shelves while the shopper waited.

Clarence Saunders saw that this antiquated method of passing along a written grocery list to a clerk to pick items resulted in wasted time and expense, so he came up with a solution that would revolutionize the entire grocery industry: a way for shoppers to serve themselves. Saunders showcased this concept in the first Piggly Wiggly store in Memphis, Tennessee.

Now that shoppers could select their own items, the stage was set for convenience stores, and the first convenience store opened in May 1927 in Dallas, Texas. At the time, icehouses sold big blocks for use in iceboxes. Icehouses were open 16 hours, unlike grocery stores that closed at 5 p.m., to make it convenient to pick up blocks of ice in the cooler evening hours.

“Uncle Johnny” Jefferson Green, who ran the Southland Ice Dock, realized that customers sometimes needed to buy things such as bread, milk and eggs after the local grocery stores were closed. So, he decided to stock a few of those staple items. The idea turned out to be very convenient for customers.

Joseph Thompson, one of the founders and later president and chair of The Southland Corporation, saw the potential of Uncle Johnny’s big idea and brought it to other ice docks, which were open from 7 a.m. to 11 p.m., seven days a week. Eventually, the company rebranded its stores around its hours: 7-Eleven.

The next big evolution: Self-serve fueling, which had been around in some form since 1947, although state and local fire codes kept the concept from growing. And it wasn’t truly self-serve since an attendant was still required at the forecourt to collect money and authorize the pump.

In June 1964, the Big Top convenience store chain introduced the first remote self-service gas pumps in Westminster, Colorado. On that first day, fuel sales only totaled 124 gallons.

It took the loosening of restric­tions—only 13 states permitted self-serve in 1964, but that number increased to 42 by 1972—and the oil price shock of 1973-74 that made customers more interested in pump­ing their own gas to save some money for self-serve fueling to take off.

Self-serve gas had massive implica­tions for additional self-serve ideas at convenience stores over the next half-century. By the mid-1960s, 7-Eleven had introduced self-serve, to-go coffee and self-serve fountain soda. By the decade’s end, the first ATM was introduced.

Wave 3: Delivery via Electronic Devices

Home delivery has historically been linked with a device. Originally the device was a pen and a catalog order form. Later, the device used most for placing orders was a landline telephone.

In 1982, a new device was added. The television set became the equivalent of a print catalog with the debut of the Home Shopping Club, a local cable TV channel that evolved into the national Home Shopping Network in 1985.

New electronic devices also were introduced at convenience stores in the 1980s. First it was pay-at-the-pump, introduced in Europe in 1982 and in the United States in 1986 by E-Z Serve and its subsidiary AutoGas in Abilene, Texas. The dispensers featured a built-in credit/debit card reader system.

Some retailers feared that self-serve fueling would discourage in-store purchases. Instead, pay-at-the-pump increased industry sales, and customers who wanted only fuel embraced the added convenience. Meanwhile, pay-at-the-pump increased in-store foot traffic because lines inside were shorter.

Altoona, Pennsylvania-based convenience retailer Sheetz pioneered touchscreen kiosks for food ordering in 1993, replacing the cumbersome golf pencil and strip of paper traditionally used at delis to place orders. By 1996, every Sheetz store had the technology.

Touchscreens soon evolved outside the store. In 2014, Sheetz became the first company to experiment with touchscreen kiosks at the pump, where customers could order foodservice items to pick up after they refueled. Sheetz abandoned the idea because it was difficult to execute.

Two University of Virginia students, Steve Huffman and Alexis Ohanian, conceptualized an idea to order Sheetz sandwiches from the pump using their cellphones. They pitched their idea to a startup investor in 2005, who suggested they try something easier. So, Huffman and Ohanian developed a new concept, launching the popular social news aggregation, web content rating and discussion website called Reddit.

Order-by-device innovations set the stage for how retail could take advantage of the coming digital revolution. The in-store experience blended with the online experience, aided by mobile devices. The device became more convenient when the iPhone debuted in June 2007, followed by Apple’s App Store in 2008.

Smartphones quickly moved from a nice-to-have device to something essential to stay connected to each other and to mainstream businesses. In 2016, ExxonMobil released the Speedpass+ app, which allows consumers to pay for gas directly from their smartphones at the pump at thousands of Exxon and Mobil locations across the United States.

Wave 4: Artificial Intelligence

In looking at the first three waves of convenience, each wave was roughly half the length of the one prior. The first wave focusing on the home, was around 130 years until the second wave focused on the car. And that lasted more than 60 years until the third wave emerged, incorporating the touchscreen. It’s now been more than 40 years since the third wave. The fourth wave has already begun, combining all three previous waves with AI.

AI means that machines are constantly investigating your behavior and offering up ideas that they think you like. These machines are also making recommendations on items you should buy or read, or for just about anything that you might do in your day. This means consumers today not only know what they want, but they expect the businesses they engage with to know what they want, too.

And while an AI-powered robot chef executing your foodservice program probably still feels like something out of “The Jetsons,” the practical uses of AI to run the business are plentiful. Back-office tasks that once took a manager hours are becoming fully automated. AI agents are controlling inventory management, forecasting and ordering.

Point-of-sale systems equipped with AI offer employees in-the-moment training for customer needs. Predictive maintenance can clock equipment problems before they become a problem for the customer or cause downtime. Computer vision self-checkout machines are reducing the labor burden on frontline workers. An AI chatbot can connect to your back-office software to make recommendations about how to increase sales.

How might AI evolve as a fourth wave of convenience? AI is scary and exhilarating at the same time. But the same could be said about all change. Most likely, AI won’t replace humans. Done right, it can allow them to be more human, whether in their jobs or in their lives.

More than anything, new concepts or applications of technology must meet consumers’ convenience needs. After all, convenience is king, and those who will win are those who can continue to redefine it.