Walmart is testing program paying employees to deliver online orders on their way home
Retailer lets workers deliver packages during commutes home — Test of new program began at stores in New Jersey and Arkansas — Wal-Mart Stores Inc. is testing a program that sends store employees …
Context & Ripple Effects
Walmart has been running delivery experiments for a year before this test: a pilot with Uber and Lyft for grocery delivery in Denver and Phoenix, which itself followed Sam's Club working with Deliv in Miami since March. The new twist is dropping the middleman entirely — paying its own store associates to carry packages home on commutes they were already making, starting at New Jersey and Arkansas stores.
The experiment matters because it tests whether a big-box retailer's payroll can serve as last-mile infrastructure cheaper than gig platforms. In the end it did not stick: Walmart later quietly ended the employee-delivery pilot and instead scaled via contractors, announcing grocery delivery in 100 cities through partners led by Uber.
First-order effects
- Store employees at the New Jersey and Arkansas test locations gain a paid side task layered onto their existing commute, while Walmart acquires last-mile delivery capacity without hiring couriers or paying per-drop gig rates.
- The program puts Walmart's own workforce in direct competition with the Uber and Lyft drivers it had been paying for grocery deliveries in Denver and Phoenix.
Second-order effects
- If the model spread beyond two states, gig platforms would lose a marquee retail client's volume to an in-house alternative, pressuring the per-delivery pricing Walmart negotiates with those partners.
- Rivals like Amazon and Target would face a competitor whose marginal cost of a suburban drop approaches zero — no driver recruitment, no surge pricing — forcing them to justify their courier networks on speed rather than cost.
Third-order effects
- The eventual shutdown of the pilot and pivot to the 100-city contractor model suggests the structural answer: large retailers are converging on hybrid last-mile fleets that blend employees, gig contractors, and partners, choosing per-market whichever labor source is cheapest.
- As retailers blur the line between payroll and delivery labor, expect growing regulatory scrutiny over how employee-delivery time is classified and compensated — the same worker-status questions now surfacing around independent delivery drivers.
The trend: Big-box retailers are experimenting with turning existing store payrolls into last-mile delivery networks, but the evidence so far favors gig-contract partnerships over employee-based models.