Walmart says it plans to expand InHome, its grocery service that delivers directly to customer's refrigerators, from 6M households across the US to 30M in 2022
Walmart is expanding its service that will deliver your groceries directly to your refrigerator, the company announced today.
Context & Ripple Effects
InHome began as a cautious experiment: Walmart launched the fridge-entry service in just three cities back in fall 2019, testing whether shoppers would hand their front doors to a delivery driver. That pilot now anchors a fivefold jump to 30 million households by end of 2022.
The expansion sits on top of infrastructure Walmart has been building since it moved grocery delivery in-house after starting with an Uber-partnered, contract-worker model for 100-city coverage in 2018, and layered its $98/year Delivery Unlimited membership over it in 2019. Going from 6M to 30M homes turns InHome from a novelty into a real share of Walmart's last-mile economics.
First-order effects
- Walmart's own delivery associates, not gig contractors, become the workforce trusted to enter 30 million homes — a staffing and training commitment that scales with every new market added this year.
- Shoppers in newly covered metros get a delivery tier no rival currently matches: groceries placed directly into the refrigerator, unattended.
Second-order effects
- Competitors relying on third-party courier networks face a trust gap they cannot close with contract labor — matching InHome means building vetted, employee-based last-mile operations of their own.
- InHome gives Delivery Unlimited a premium anchor, letting Walmart push membership value beyond free shipping and pull more grocery spend away from rivals like Amazon and Target, whom it already battles head-to-head on events like Prime Day.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds, the last mile stops being an outsourced commodity and becomes a retailer-owned moat: whoever employs the people allowed inside the home controls the most defensible layer of grocery e-commerce.
- Home-entry delivery normalizes in-home access as a service category, setting up future extensions — returns, restocking, smart-home integrations — that depend on the same trusted-employee infrastructure Walmart is now scaling.
The trend: Grocery e-commerce is shifting from outsourced gig delivery toward retailer-owned, employee-staffed last-mile networks that extend all the way into the customer's kitchen.