Whole Paycheck: Amazon And Walmart Use Drones, Self-Driving Trucks And 767s to Beat Each Other At Delivery

Winning the battle for the consumer’s whole paycheck requires winning the battle for delivery, and Amazon and Walmart are throwing everything from driverless trucks to drones to a new Amazon fleet of Boeing 767s into that.

Walmart Gets Green Light to Start Drone Delivery Near Arkansas HQ

Walmart this week got local zoning approval from the city of Pea Ridge, Arkansas, near its company headquarters, to start using the chain’s local store as a drone launch-and-delivery hub.

Local TV station KNWA reported that the drones can deliver packages weighing up to four pounds within a 50-mile radius. The station said Walmart plans to work in partnership Zipline International to use the devices to deliver medical supplies.

“They’ve done a lot of research,” Pea Ridge Mayor Jackie Crabtree told KNWA. “The noise levels, the flight paths, everything that needs to be paid attention to, they’ve done that.”

Driverless Truck Test Shifts Into High Gear at Walmart

Meanwhile, Walmart is expanding an 18-month-old test of using driverless trucks from a company called Gatik for inter-store deliveries.

The chain recently said that after 70,000 miles of test drives involving a driverless truck with a human driver aboard for safety, the company has gotten the okay to run the vehicle with no one on board.

Walmart and Gatik have been using the trucks to deliver goods two miles from a “dark store” to a shop that’s open to the public in Bentonville. Now, the test will continue without a human driver as a backup.

Walmart is also launching a second test in which a driverless truck will travel 20 miles between New Orleans and Metairie, Louisiana to deliver items from a Supercenter to a Walmart “pickup point” where customers can claim their orders.

Gatik Co-founder and CEO Gautam Narang recently wrote that the test’s expansion represents “an historic technological and regulatory milestone for the industry, signifying the first-ever driverless operation carried out for the supply chain’s middle mile.”

“With a drastic rise in eCommerce, driven by rapidly evolving consumer needs and compounded by driver shortages, the middle mile has been a thorn in the side of major retailers, and one that can only be solved with automation,” Narang wrote. “Driverless operations will enable our customers to realize the full potential of autonomous delivery: significant cost savings that can be passed onto the consumer, a high-functioning hub-and-spoke distribution model and short delivery times that keep consumers satisfied.”

Tom Ward, senior vice president of customer product for Walmart U.S., added on the retailer’s blog that the test could eventually lead to a fleet of Walmart self-driving trucks traveling continuous delivery routes.

“With 90 percent of Americans living within 10 miles of a Walmart, a closer store isn’t always the answer,” he wrote. “Perhaps it’s just a pickup location with an autonomous vehicle making deliveries on a constant loop. Our trials with Gatik are just two of many use cases we’re testing with autonomous vehicles, and we’re excited to continue learning how we might incorporate them in a delivery ecosystem.”

Amazon Makes Its First-Ever Purchase of Boeing 767 Jets

Not to be upstaged by Walmart’s drones and driverless trucks, Amazon this week announced its first-ever purchase of Boeing 767-300 jets to beef up its Amazon Air delivery fleet.

“Our goal is to continue delivering for customers across the U.S. in the way that they expect from Amazon, and purchasing our own aircraft is a natural next step toward that goal,” Sarah Rhoads, vice president of Amazon Global Air, said in announcing the move. “Having a mix of both leased and owned aircraft in our growing fleet allows us to better manage our operations, which in turn helps us to keep pace in meeting our customer promises.”

The eCommerce giant is buying seven of the planes from Delta and four from WestJet for undisclosed sums. Plans call for converting the aircraft from passenger to cargo configurations and putting them into service this year and next year.

Amazon will have third-party carriers operate the 767s, but said in a statement that adding the planes to the company fleet “will ensure added capacity in Amazon Air’s network for years to come.”

Amazon Shuts Down Prime Pantry

One thing Amazon’s new jets won’t be delivering is products from the eCommerce giant’s Prime Pantry service. That’s because Amazon disclosed plans this week to shutter the offering, which sold cleaning products and shelf-stable food in bulk.

Bloomberg reported that Amazon launched Prime Pantry in 2014 as one of its early attempts to sell food online. Prime Pantry aimed to get consumers to buy such goods in large quantities so Amazon could send them in a single large box to minimize shipping costs. The wire service said Amazon had offered Prime Pantry products to Amazon Prime members, as well as to non-members who paid a $5-a-month subscription fee.

But a company spokeswoman told Bloomberg that “as part of our commitment to delivering the best possible customer experience, we have decided to transfer Amazon Pantry selection to the main Amazon.com store so customers can get everyday household products faster, without an extra subscription or purchase requirement.”