Walmart has ended last year's pilot program that paid employees who delivered packages on their way home and is testing a more modest approach in a single store
Context & Ripple Effects
The pilot Walmart just shut down was launched in June 2017, when it began paying employees to drop off online orders on their commute home — an attempt to crowdsource last-mile capacity from its own payroll. By March 2018 the company had already pivoted hard the other way, announcing grocery delivery in 100 cities built on contract workers through partners starting with Uber.
Ending the employee-delivery experiment and retreating to a single-store test signals Walmart concluded its workforce is not a scalable delivery fleet, and the follow-on coverage confirms the direction: by September it launched Spark Delivery with Bringg at $9.95 per order, a conventional third-party last-mile product.
First-order effects
- Employees who had been earning side income delivering packages on their commutes lose that pay stream as the program winds down.
- Walmart's last-mile strategy consolidates around contract-worker partners like Uber rather than its own staff, concentrating spend with external delivery providers.
Second-order effects
- Gig platforms such as Uber capture a larger share of Walmart's delivery volume, gaining leverage as the retailer's dependence on them grows across the 100-city grocery rollout.
- A $9.95-per-delivery price point in the Spark model forces Walmart to absorb or pass on last-mile costs that the employee pilot was designed to avoid entirely.
Third-order effects
- Retailers are converging on rented gig-economy fleets over employee crowdsourcing for e-commerce fulfillment, making last-mile economics a recurring line item rather than a free byproduct of staffing.
- If employee-side-hustle delivery keeps failing at scale, the boundary between W-2 retail work and independent contractor delivery work hardens — a structure regulators scrutinizing gig labor will increasingly have to address.
The trend: Big-box retail's last mile is settling into outsourced gig-contractor networks, with each failed internal alternative — employee commuters included — pushing Walmart further toward paid third-party delivery.