Walmart’s new home delivery option

What does a retailer do if it wants to close the gap with Amazon? Think up ways to knock at a customer’s house.

With 1.5 million employees across its 4,700 outlets in the US, Walmart thinks that it is an innovative idea to use their services to knock at customers’ doorbells.

The logic cannot be faulted as the company claims that 90 per cent of Americans live within 10 miles of any of its stores. The last mile of deliveries is usually the most expensive leg of getting orders to customers. While Tesco in Britain is attempting to use robots for delivering groceries to customers and Amazon is toying with drones to the same, Walmart’s approach is more refreshing and ‘human’.

Walmart’s trial of the new option will be a voluntary one for store workers, who can sign up for a maximum of 10 deliveries a day and is limited to three stores in New Jersey and Arkansas.

Walmart, which owns Asda in the UK, is the world’s largest retailer and had revenues of $486 billion last year, compared with Amazon’s $136 billion. But Walmart has made little inroads online, while Amazon accounts for about a third of all online orders.

It remains to be seen what the employees think of this drop-this-off-on-your-way-back-will-you request of Walmart’s.

Source : https://www.theguardian.com/business/2017/jun/02/walmart-asking-staff-to-deliver-online-orders-on-their-way-home