I ordered groceries to the parking lot of the Fred Meyer on Hawthorne on Saturday, and a nineteen year old in a fleece vest handed me my week through the passenger window in under four minutes.
Four minutes. No cart. No aisles, no endcap display, no sample table, no impulse rack at the register. Everything retail spent forty years engineering to happen to me between the front door and the checkout simply did not happen.
This is the part that gets lost when brands talk about curbside pickup as a logistics upgrade. It is not a feature. It is an amputation of the entire brand experience, performed voluntarily, by the brand.
If the only surfaces you still control are an app screen, a paper bag, and thirty seconds with a person in a vest, then those three things are your store now, and almost nobody is designing them that way.
Target has clearly thought about it. Drive Up gives you a countdown, a name, and a photo of the person walking out, so the wait has a face attached to it before it even starts. The greeting is scripted lightly enough to still sound like a greeting. Somebody in that building understood that the trunk is a stage.
Most grocery chains have not gotten there. The pickup lane is a numbered sign in the worst corner of the lot, the confirmation email reads like a shipping notice, and the bag says nothing at all. I've watched this from inside brand strategy rooms: the pickup program gets built by operations, measured on cycle time, and never once shown to the people who own the brand.
The bag deserves far more attention than it gets. It is the only physical object that survives the trip. It sits on a counter for an hour. It is the last thing anyone touches. Trader Joe's worked this out about paper bags decades ago and has been collecting free affection for it ever since.
It is not a feature. It is an amputation of the entire brand experience, performed voluntarily, by the brand.
So audit the three surfaces you have left. Read your own pickup email out loud. Sit in your own lot for twenty minutes on a Saturday. Ask whether a stranger could name your brand from the bag alone.
There is a bar in Southeast Portland where I sing badly twice a month, and the host calls everyone baby and still remembers what I ordered in November. That is a thirty second interaction doing more brand work than most quarterly campaigns. Your parking lot could do that. Right now it is doing paperwork.