TULSA — At the Walmart Supercenter in Glenpool, there’s a 16-foot tall orange tower that the company hopes will help solidify the future of online shopping combined with a traditional brick and mortar location.

It’s called a “pickup tower,” and Walmart spokeswoman Anne Hatfield tells KRMG there are only five of them in the country, though more are on the way.

She describes it as “sixteen feet tall by eight feed around of pure customer convenience. It works like a giant vending machine.”

She said you order general merchandise online at Walmart.com, and choose to pick it up at the store, you’ll get an email with a barcode.

You scan that barcode at the tower, a door opens, and out comes your purchase, ready to go.

It works on anything you can order online, she said, which would exclude groceries - though the company’s got another concept that handles those purchases as well, which it’s also in the process of testing.

There’s no extra charge, and the company says testing so far has been very successful.

“So successful,” Hatfield told KRMG, “that we’re starting to roll them out in a handful of other markets.”

“Oklahoma is a very important state for us, we’re very committed to Oklahoma,” she said.

And there are plans to deploy more of the towers here in the near future.

“As a matter of fact, we do have a couple more coming to Oklahoma,” Hatfield said. “We expect at least one more coming to the Tulsa market and one coming to the Oklahoma City market either later this summer or early fall.”

She said they’re not ready to announce the exact locations yet.