Walmart announced on Tuesday that it plans to expand the package delivery service using drones that it has been offering up to now. For this, the company plans to increase the number of stores that offer the service throughout the country to be able to serve 4 million households.
In order to meet this ambitious goal, Walmart has the goal that by the end of this year 34 stores will be in capacity to offer the drone delivery service to its clients.
The numbers exposed by the company contrast with the few thousand homes that it served when this project in November 2021. For that date, Walmart was only able to make deliveries in a single town in Arkansas.
From the company they detailed that customers who live in areas close to a store with the capacity to make this type of delivery will be able to place orders between 8: 00 am and 8: 00 pm whose joint weight is equal to or less than 10 pounds.
They added that these deliveries will cost only $3,99 and will be carried out by a company called DroneUp, which is working in collaboration with Walmart to get the products to customers.
They also indicated that once the store receives the order, the employees only have to deal with packaging the products in a box and then secure it to the drone, so that it can take off and go to the location of the person who made the purchase.
Once in your destination, the drone will remain in the air and will lower the package to the ground using a kind of clamp that has a harness that can extend for several meters.
Walmart said that to date, in In a matter of months, they have already made hundreds of successful shipments through this innovative method. However, they expect this number to increase to more than 1 million deliveries per year in the future.
Although Walmart expected that drone deliveries were going to be limited to what they call “emergency purchases”, the data collected in recent months has revealed that users have no problem ordering any type of item this way.
If Walmart’s plans materialize, the company could position itself as the top benchmark for deliveries with drones in the United States, something that other companies such as UPS and FedEx have not been able to achieve at the moment since they are still in the development phases of their own services.
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