Walmart has worked tirelessly for the past year to ensure our supply chain remains stable and strong for our customers, no matter when, where or how they want to shop this holiday season.
Walmart has a long history of supporting customers, especially during the busiest and most important time of the year – the holiday season. In recent weeks, you’ve probably seen us highlighting how we’re kicking off the holiday season, offering the best deals on the season’s top toys and bringing on additional associates to ensure we’re getting customers what they want and need during the holidays.
Our supply chain is essential to how we serve customers during the holiday season, and we all know the challenges of the past year. This year, customers are facing new challenges like economic pressure from inflation. Additionally, global supply chains have improved – but not fully recovered – post-pandemic. We’re also seeing sustained shifts in consumer shopping behavior, with people doing their holiday shopping earlier than ever.
We’ve taken numerous steps to ensure our supply chain is ready this holiday season, including:
- Optimizing our supply chain operations end-to-end and working closely with our carriers across ports, rail and delivery to ensure an efficient flow of merchandise into stores and strong in-stock levels for customers.
- Serving customers by fulfilling orders through our 4,700 stores located within 10 miles of 90% of the population. We’re offering convenient pickup and delivery options for more than 240,000 items, Express Delivery within 2 hours and Free Next-Day or Two-Day Delivery on online orders.
- Bringing customers fast, reliable delivery through the Spark Driver platform, our largest local delivery service provider reaching 84% of U.S. households across 10,000 pickup points.
- Introducing an extended return policy along with convenient curbside returns at customers’ local stores and providing more convenience for Walmart+ members through InHome Delivery and easy return pick-up from home.
- Testing and expanding our local delivery capabilities with drone delivery and autonomous and electric vehicles, including expanding our DroneUp delivery network to 34 sites by the end the year with the potential to reach 4 million U.S. households across six states.
- Building four next generation fulfillment centers over the next three years, with our first opening recently in Joliet, Illinois. These investments in automation and innovation enable us to flow products faster through our distribution and fulfillment network into stores.
- Deploying automated technology in three distribution centers with three more slated to go live before the end of this year.
- Hiring approximately 40,000 associates across our U.S. business ahead of the holidays, which includes investing in and training our team of supply chain associates by growing our Walmart Private Fleet. We’re building on our network of drivers by bringing on an additional 1,500 associates to ensure our fleet is prepared to drive and deliver this holiday season and beyond.
This holiday season, our customers can rest assured that we’re ready to deliver the items they want and need this holiday season at the Every Day Low Prices they expect from Walmart.
