Today, Target announced that it’s working to expand Drive Up to almost a thousand stores in the US by the end of 2018. The Drive Up program allowed customers to submit their online orders on the Target app and have them brought out to their cars by a store team members minutes after arriving at their designated Target location.
Target first tested the Drive Up service last fall near its headquarters in the Minneapolis-Saint Paul region. At this time, Target has declined to elaborate about what specific cities the service will be expanded to.
The company says that the service is useful for those that have small children they need to keep occupied while out running errands or those that are making bulk purchases of bottle water or big home electronics.
Here’s basically how it works: Through the Target app you place your order, select Drive Up as your pickup option, and then service will send you an alert when your order to ready to be picked up, which will usually be ready within an hour, Target says. Once you get to your designated Drive Up parking area, Target staff will come outside with your order to drop off within an average of two minutes. This is a good indication that there isn’t a lot of wait time from the time you arrive to the time you get your order.
While Drive Up is currently only available on iOS, Target says that it’s working to expand the service to Android users starting in April.
While you have companies like Amazon that are offering Prime Now service, Drive Up sounds like a pretty nice alternative. If you have a Whole Foods around your area, you can get your groceries delivered within two hours and for $8 extra, you can get them within an hour.
In addition to the expansion of Drive Up program, Target gave a few other small updates too. The company is including two-day shipping on hundreds of thousands of items for those who have their Target REDcard or spend more than $35. In addition, it’s expanding its same-day in-store delivery option to cities like all of New York City, Chicago, DC, San Francisco, and parts of Boston.
