Finnish retail company Kesko has announced that its stores’ parcel and postal transactions have quadrupled in 2016.
Parcel and postal services can be found in 800 ‘K-food’ stores throughout Finland, and rose from three million to 14 million transactions last year.
The company said it will continue to invest in the development of its parcel and postal service network and products for parcel and postal services.
In addition to Posti’s postal service points and parcel collection lockers, K-food stores also include ‘UPS pick-up points, DHL packstations and an expansive Matkahuolto delivery network, which continues in the K-Markets that were previously Siwa and Valintatalo stores’.
K-Market retailer, Toni Penttala, says the trend is that parcels are being picked up more in the evenings and at weekends, “We have a lot of parcels that are collected in the afternoons and they also move briskly in and out at weekends. Customers collecting and sending our parcels clearly appreciate the flexibility offered by longer opening hours,”
Expanded Network
In addition to this, K-Food has also announced that its stores will have DB Schenker pick-up points in the future.
The K Group and DB Schenker, a German logistics company, signed a nationwide cooperation agreement in April, which extend DB its pick-up network to K-food stores.
Petri Toivonen, Kesko's Services Director, said, “Our agreement with DB Schenker and Matkahuolto as well as the strong growth of co-operation between K-food stores and Posti will mean that almost every type of parcel can be collected from a local K-store when people go grocery shopping in the future”.
Antti Jarva, Head of DB Schenker's Parcel Finland, also commented, saying, ““K-stores will further diversify the network of our widespread pick-up points and we will also deliver online purchase shipments via DB Schenker's own international network, even from China to your local K-store or carried and installed directly in the consumer's home.”
© 2017 European Supermarket Magazine – your source for the latest retail news. Article by Aidan O’Sullivan. Click subscribe to sign up to ESM: The European Supermarket Magazine.
