Walmart and August Home partner to test “in-fridge” delivery service

Walmart has announced a new delivery concept that will seem really convenient to some and super creepy to others.

Partnering with August Home, a leading purveyor of smart locks, Walmart will begin testing an “in-fridge delivery” service in Silicon Valley that not only does grocery shopping for customers but also puts the food away for them if no one is home. It also applies to general packages, delivering them inside the residence instead of leaving them outside, where they could get lost or stolen.

Here’s how Walmart envisions the service to work. A customer (who also employs August Home’s smart locks in their home) places an order on walmart.com. When the order is ready, a delivery person will bring the groceries and other packages to the house and unlock the door by way of a one-time passcode that the homeowner will have pre-authorized. After the items have been unloaded into the refrigerator, the delivery person will leave, and the door will lock automatically.

The homeowner can monitor the entire process through the August mobile app, even watching the delivery as it happens in real time by way of August home security cameras.

“These tests are a natural evolution of what Walmart is all about—an obsession in saving our customers not just money but also time, making our customers’ lives easier in the process,” the company said on its website. What do you think? Dystopian, or the way of the future?