Walmart to offer home delivery of groceries in 100 cities by year's end by partnering with delivery companies using contract workers, starting with Uber
for a fee Monica Chin / Mashable : Walmart's grocery delivery service to launch in 100 cities Business Wire : Walmart to Expand Online Grocery Delivery Coast to Coast Shawn Knight / TechSpot : Walmart's grocery delivery business will reach 40 percent of US households by year's end Jeff Wells / Retail Dive : Walmart ramps up grocery delivery to head off Amazon John Cook / GeekWire : Walmart counterpunches Amazon with plan to expand grocery delivery service to 100 U.S. markets Lisa Lacy / Adweek : Take That, Prime Now: Walmart Expands Grocery Delivery Clint Rainey / grubstreet : Walmart Will Launch Same-Day Grocery Delivery in NYC Alexandra Burlacu / Tech Times : Good News, Walmart Shoppers: Grocery Delivery Will Reach 100 More Cities Tweets: @nytimesbusiness : “The thing that's great about grocery is that it's a pure traffic driver — no matter who you are, you need to get groceries every two weeks, which makes it an exception from all the other categories that keep retailers up at night.” http://www.nytimes.com/...
Context & Ripple Effects
This turns the Denver-and-Phoenix pilot Walmart has run with Uber and Lyft since 2016 into a coast-to-coast program, and it lands squarely in the Amazon fight — Retail Dive and GeekWire both framed the rollout as a direct counter to Prime Now.
The surrounding coverage also shows how the experiment ultimately resolved: within two months Walmart confirmed the Uber and Lyft partnerships had ended, and by mid-2019 it was piloting InHome delivery straight into customers' refrigerators — making this announcement the high-water mark of the rent-the-gig-fleet approach.
First-order effects
- Walmart's grocery delivery reaches roughly 40 percent of US households by year's end, giving shoppers in 100 markets a paid home-delivery option built on existing stores rather than new warehouses.
- Uber gains a high-frequency retail account that keeps drivers earning between fares, while Walmart buys last-mile capacity per delivery instead of standing up its own fleet.
Second-order effects
- Amazon's Prime Now now competes against a service that piggybacks on Walmart's store network, pressuring the economics of warehouse-centric fresh grocery delivery.
- Regional grocers without national scale face a widening convenience gap and must either strike their own gig-platform deals or cede the online grocery basket.
Third-order effects
- If retailers keep renting last-mile capacity from gig marketplaces, control of the driver network — not shelf price — becomes the decisive asset in online grocery, concentrating leverage with the platforms.
- The model's fragility is already visible in the record: Walmart scrapped the Uber and Lyft deals within months and moved toward employee-run InHome delivery, suggesting big-box grocery ultimately insources the last mile once volume justifies it.
The trend: US grocery is becoming a last-mile logistics contest in which big-box retailers first rent gig-economy delivery capacity to counter Amazon, then pull it back in-house as volumes mature.