Walmart has adapted to the online shopping era, delivering five billion items same-day in 2024, reports Sarah Nassauer of The Wall Street Journal. It now provides fast grocery and product delivery to 93% of U.S. households, using freelance drivers through its Spark app. Despite Amazon’s dominance, Walmart’s revenue reached $681 billion in 2024, closing the gap. For example, Ramchandra Apte prefers Walmart’s grocery delivery for convenience and value, while still shopping on Amazon for other items. Nassauer writes:
A decade ago, Walmart’s thousands of stores across the country made it look like a dinosaur in the online-shopping era. Now the retail giant is mounting one of the few serious challenges to Amazon.com’s AMZN dominance in e-commerce, and those very stores are central to its strategy.
Walmart delivered five billion items on the same day they were ordered last year, double the number delivered in 2023. It can now deliver most of the 120,000 products in its sprawling supercenters, including meat, eggs and milk, to 93% of U.S. households the same day, sometimes in hours.
Amazon doesn’t release figures that allow an exact comparison of its same-day delivery reach. But Walmart’s sprawling delivery network, which in some areas is faster than Amazon’s, represents a leap that would have been unimaginable just a few years ago. […]
But over years of attempts, tests and failures, Walmart has carved out a niche that has Amazon working to catch up—fast delivery of online orders that often include inexpensive groceries, and increasingly other items it sells in its stores, such as clothing, decor, batteries and prescription medicines. […]
Over the past decade, Walmart executives realized they needed to use their grocery business to fend off Amazon’s expansion. Walmart gets more than 50% of its U.S. revenue from selling meat, eggs, lettuce and other groceries. It has used its scale to drive down prices for those items, which draw shoppers for regular trips.[…]
That led it to build its own system, called Spark, named after the company’s six-pointed yellow logo. In 2018 Walmart announced a test of its own network of independent drivers to expand its grocery-delivery reach, which at the time covered about 40% of U.S. households. Today tens of thousands of Spark drivers, who aren’t Walmart employees and are paid by the delivery, make the majority of the retailer’s same-day deliveries.
Walmart pays Spark drivers about $10, plus tip, to pick up orders from Walmart workers at stores, and sometimes collect items from shelves. If an order includes many items or is a longer drive, the payment goes up. […]
Ramchandra Apte, a software engineer, recently moved from Chicago into a New Jersey apartment near New York City. When Walmart offered a discount for Walmart+ and higher-tier subscription called InHome, he signed up, even though there’s a Whole Foods closer to him than Walmart.
Whole Foods is “more expensive, and I have to carry all the groceries,” said Apte, who doesn’t own a car. “It’s a pain.”
He still orders nongrocery items from Amazon but finds Walmart delivery is a bit faster for groceries. “I make plenty of money,” the 23-year-old said. “I am just trying to save time mostly, and also get good value for the money I spend.”
