Waitrose is reportedly thinking about using GPS technology to detect when consumers are approaching stores so staff can rush to prepare their click & collect order.

The concept would have sounded far-fetched only a couple of years ago. But today much less so. The smartphone revolution has taken hold and the use of mobiles for shopping has grown exponentially.

The high numbers of online grocery orders now being made by smartphone has taken many by surprise.

But the jury is still out on click & collect. Supermarkets are certainly pilling resources into click & collect and in that sense it is a breakthrough year.

In the past month, Tesco has said it plans to expand click & collect to all stores, Waitrose has opened its first click & collect lockers, and last week, Asda outlined its rollout plans – adding that it expected click & collect to become as big as delivery. Bricks and mortar retailers would love to see click & collect take off. It allows them to embrace online in a way that is complementary to stores.

But I remain unconvinced. In France click & collect has been big business for years but over the channel grocery delivery is economically unviable in most postcodes because population density is so much lower than in the UK.

Over here, we have home delivery in most parts of the country. So why would you choose click & collect?

It offers all the inconvenience of shopping online with all the inconvenience of shopping in stores. You have to spend half an hour trawling through a website to place your order, and then you can’t even sit back and wait for your shopping to be delivered to your fridge. You then have to trudge down to your local store, in which case, you may as well have gone to the store without going through all the hassle of placing the order online.

Judging by the lack of activity around click & collect points in stores, it would appear that most people remain similarly unconvinced.

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