Walmart Is Latest to Get Into Grocery Delivery Business

By Douglas A. McIntyre Updated Jan 11, 6:21PM EST · Published Sep 6, 6:35AM EDT

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Walmart Is Latest to Get Into Grocery Delivery Business — © Julie Clopper / iStock

Walmart Inc. (NYSE: WMT) has set a new experiment to deliver groceries to people’s homes. The initiative joins similar ones by Amazon.com Inc. (NASDAQ: AMZN) and Kroger Co. (NYSE: KR). The success of the attempts will rely as much on how many people want home delivery of groceries as on the quality of the delivery systems and the size of each company’s retail location footprint.

The world’s largest retailer announced:

As Walmart expands its Grocery Delivery service, giving its customers the option to shop when and how they want, the company today announced a new last-mile delivery pilot – Spark Delivery – exploring an additional way to get groceries from their stores to customers’ front doors.

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Spark Delivery is a crowd-sourced delivery platform that allows Walmart to learn even more about the full last-mile delivery process. The pilot uses an in-house platform that provides drivers with the ability to sign up for windows of time that work best for their schedule as well as Grocery Delivery order details, navigation assistance and more. Components of Spark are powered by Bringg, a leading delivery logistics technology platform. Walmart’s team of personal shoppers are an important component of the overall process as they meticulously shop for customers’ orders. Spark Delivery engages the services of independent drivers who partner with Delivery Drivers, Inc, a nationwide firm who specializes in last-mile contractor management, to complete deliveries.

Walmart effectively has spread the financial risk of the effort to much smaller companies that want to be part of the chain that stretches from stores to people’s homes.

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Walmart cannot know, as its competition does not, how many people have an interest in home delivery. If the figure is small, all the experiments may fail. However, none of the three companies can afford for a rival to take a big lead and effectively control the grocery to the home system. That control, if it happens, still will rely on where each company has retail locations or major distribution centers. If that is a measure, Walmart and Kroger have an advantage because each has thousands of stores.

Walmart’s grocery delivery plans may be the winner within the industry for the simple fact of the size of its chain and its proximity to a large part of the American population.
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About the Author Douglas A. McIntyre →

Douglas A. McIntyre is the co-founder, chief executive officer and editor in chief of 24/7 Wall St. and 24/7 Tempo. He has held these jobs since 2006.

McIntyre has written thousands of articles for 24/7 Wall St. He is an expert on corporate finance, the automotive industry, media companies and international finance. He has edited articles on national demographics, sports, personal income and travel.

His work has been quoted or mentioned in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Los Angeles Times, The Washington Post, NBC News, Time, The New Yorker, HuffPost USA Today, Business Insider, Yahoo, AOL, MarketWatch, The Atlantic, Bloomberg, New York Post, Chicago Tribune, Forbes, The Guardian and many other major publications. McIntyre has been a guest on CNBC, the BBC and television and radio stations across the country.

A magna cum laude graduate of Harvard College, McIntyre also was president of The Harvard Advocate. Founded in 1866, the Advocate is the oldest college publication in the United States.

TheStreet.com, Comps.com and Edgar Online are some of the public companies for which McIntyre served on the board of directors. He was a Vicinity Corporation board member when the company was sold to Microsoft in 2002. He served on the audit committees of some of these companies.

McIntyre has been the CEO of FutureSource, a provider of trading terminals and news to commodities and futures traders. He was president of Switchboard, the online phone directory company. He served as chairman and CEO of On2 Technologies, the video compression company that provided video compression software for Adobe’s Flash. Google bought On2 in 2009.