Walmart Rolls Out 2-Hour Grocery Delivery Service

Retail giant Walmart is reportedly rolling out a new ‘express’ grocery delivery service promising two-hour deliveries as record usage of third-party delivery services during the Wuhan coronavirus pandemic has led to delayed orders, fewer open delivery windows, and more stress for customers not willing to visit brick and mortar shops. The service will be rolled out to nearly 2,000 stores in May.

TechCrunch reports that Walmart has begun trialing a new grocery delivery services as the demand for home grocery delivery skyrockets due to the Wuhan coronavirus pandemic. Walmart confirmed this week that it’s launching a new Walmart Grocery service called “Express” which promises to deliver orders in two hours or less for an upcharge of $10 on top of the usual delivery fee.

The service has been in pilot testing across 100 Walmart stores in the United States since mid-April and the firm plans to expand the service to almost 1,000 stores in early May and will be offered in a total of nearly 2,000 stores in the weeks after. Walmart sent push notifications to some customers alerting them to the launch.

Users can use Express delivery by filling their online Walmart Grocery cart with the $30 minimum purchase required for delivery orders or more. The Express service offers more than 160,000 items from across Walmart’s grocery, consumables, and general merchandise categories.

When checking out online, users will see an option beneath the calendar where you can pick a delivery date to select the Express service. In some cases, there may not be a standard delivery time slot available for the current day which makes the Expres service even more appealing to shoppers who need to receive their orders sooner.

Although the service is advertised as a “two-hour” delivery service, the average delivery time for the pilot program so far has been approximately 56 minutes.

“The demand that we’ve seen during the coronavirus pandemic is making us push forward and expedite the development of some services that we may have been thinking about,” a Walmart spokesperson explained. “But demand has pushed us to innovate more quickly,” they added.

Tom Ward, Walmart senior vice president of Customer Product, commented: “We have an opportunity to serve our customers no matter what life calls for. Whether it be a last-minute ingredient, medicine when a fever hits or the item you didn’t know you needed when checking off your chore list, time matters. Express is a solve for that.”

The service will likely serve as competition for Instacart, which has been on a massive Gig Economy hiring spree of more than 500,000 “shoppers” during the Chinese virus.