Dark store

A dark store is a small warehouse inside a neighbourhood, stocked like a grocery shop but closed to customers, from which online orders are packed and sent out within minutes. It is called "dark" because no shopper ever walks in. Its shelves are arranged for the employees who pick the orders, not for browsing. Dark stores are what make quick commerce, the delivery of groceries in ten or fifteen minutes, possible.

Here is how a dark store works in general. The operator rents a space of a few thousand square feet, often a basement or a ground floor in a residential area. Each store serves only the homes within two or three kilometres, so that a rider can reach any of them in a few minutes. Software forecasts what those homes will buy, hour by hour, and the store is restocked from a larger warehouse, often more than once a day. When an order arrives, the software sends it to the nearest store that has every item in stock. A picker collects the items from shelves numbered for speed, packs them in a minute or two, and hands the bag to a waiting rider.

A dark store holds only a few thousand products, far fewer than a large supermarket. It keeps the ones its neighbourhood buys most, and relies on demand forecasting to have them on the shelf before they are ordered. If an item runs out, that store cannot fill the order, and the customer sees the item as unavailable.

Take, for example, a family that runs out of milk at eleven at night. A picker in a dark store a kilometre away packs the milk, and a rider brings it to the door in about ten minutes.

Consider ten-minute food delivery. The same idea is applied to cooked food: small kitchens close to the customers prepare the most likely dishes in advance, because those orders have been forecast.

Say a supermarket chain wants to deliver in minutes without new buildings. In omnichannel retail, an ordinary store also works as a dark store, and employees pack app orders from its shelves while walk-in customers shop.

How is a dark store different from a fulfilment centre? A fulfilment centre is a large warehouse, often outside the city. It holds a huge range of products and sends parcels by courier in a day or two. A dark store is small, sits among the homes it serves, holds a narrow range and sends orders by rider in minutes. A cloud kitchen, sometimes called a dark kitchen, is the same idea for cooking: a kitchen that cooks only for delivery and has no dining room.