Last updated on June 5th, 2017 at 02:35 pm
As Lore’s post says: “It just makes sense: We already have trucks moving orders from fulfillment centers to stores for pickup. Those same trucks could be used to bring ship-to-home orders to a store close to their final destination, where a participating associate can sign up to deliver them to the customer’s house. The best part is this gives our own associates a way to earn extra income on their existing drive home.
“Associates are fully in control of their experience. If they don’t want to participate, they don’t have to. If they choose to opt in, we’ve built technology that allows them to set preferences. Associates choose how many packages they can deliver, the size and weight limits of those packages and which days they’re able to make deliveries after work—it’s completely up to them, and they can update those preferences at any time. We also allocate packages based on minimizing the collective distance they need to travel off of their commute to make a delivery.”
Walmart has 4,700 stores across the U.S. and more than a million associates. The company reports that its stores put it within 10 miles of 90 percent of the U.S. population.
Lore, in imagining the routes the company’s associates drive to and from work and the homes they pass along the way, says it’s easy to see how associate delivery could be a “game-changer.”
“This last-mile innovation is one of a kind,” he says in his blog post.”Unlike crowdsourced delivery, where the driver has to travel (often out of the way) to pick up the package, then drive the full distance to deliver it, our associates are starting at the same place as the packages. Once they’re done working at the store for the day, they pick up the packages from the backroom, load them into their vehicle, enter the delivery addresses into the GPS on their phone and head toward home.”
