Walmart Scraps Associate-Delivery Plan: Report

A plan to utilize store employees as part-time e-commerce delivery drivers at Walmart stores has come to an end, a report said.

Officials of the Bentonville, Ark.-based retailer announced in 2017 that the initiative—which would involve workers dropping off online orders fulfilled at stores on their way home from work in a manner not unlike “gig economy” drivers—would attack the high costs of the so-called “last mile.”

However, Reuters reported that Walmart quietly dropped the program earlier this year after employees in the test markets of Northeast Arkansas and New Jersey failed to buy in, and that it was now testing a different means of fulfillment out of a single store in Georgia, whereby some employees are using their own cars to fulfill online grocery orders only.

Marc Lore, Walmart’s e-commerce CEO, said at the time of the launch that the associate-delivery idea was a way for the company to leverage its size and employee base to fulfill a need in the marketplace in a way that smaller companies and “pure-play” online retailers could not. But officials were also careful to impart the notion that it was a test.

The episode illustrates the lengths that retailers are going to go to explore ways of containing the costs of fulfilling online shopping orders. Walmart, which has demonstrated a demand for such convenience through a booming click-and-collect offering, has been especially active in this field, testing and then abandoning using contracted drivers through Lyft and Uber, and is now partnering with delivery firms such as DoorDash, Postmates and Parcel, a delivery company it acquired in 2017.

Related:Walmart Readies for Waymo Self-Driving Cars

Most recently Walmart said it would test a service through Google’s Waymo that would take shoppers to stores in self-driving cars to pick up orders. Rival Kroger in the meantime said it would explore using self-driving vans from Nuro to deliver to customer’s homes.