You can see this in our rapid expansion of online grocery pickup across the country, as well as the grocery home delivery service offered in San Jose, California and Denver, Colorado. At our annual Shareholders Meeting, our CEO Doug McMillon will announce our newest pilot; a last-mile delivery test through services like Uber, Lyft and Deliv. Walmart will start with tests of grocery delivery through Uber in Phoenix and Lyft in Denver, which we expect to start within the next two weeks. This is in addition to a very quiet Sam’s Club pilot that started in March with Deliv involving delivery of general merchandise and grocery for business members in Miami.
Here’s how it works for Walmart grocery customers: A customer in one of the test locations places their grocery order online and selects a delivery window. Our personal shoppers, highly-trained Walmart associates, will carefully select and prepare their order. Then, our team may request a driver from one of these services to come to the store, pick up the customer’s order, and take it directly to the customer’s location. It’s all seamless to the customer. They pay us our normal $7-10 delivery charge online, and make no payment to the driver. We’ll also let them know their order is being delivered by a driver from Uber or Lyft.
At Sam’s Club, the process is very similar, with our personal shoppers preparing the orders for business members, and having their order delivered right to their door with Deliv. Our members who have used it, love it.
We’re thrilled about the possibility of delivering new convenient options to our customers, and about working with some transformative companies in this test. We’ll start small and let our customers guide us, but testing new things like last-mile delivery allows us to better evaluate the various ways we can best serve our customers how, when and where they need us.
