Walmart Is Turning Its Employees Into Delivery Drivers To Compete With Amazon (qz.com)

Walmart, which is aggressively investing in e-commerce to better compete with Amazon, is unveiling a new strategy: turning its army of 1.5 million US employees into delivery drivers. From a report: The tactic is being tested at three stores in New Jersey and Arkansas, and designed to shave costs out of the "last mile" of distribution, the most expensive part of getting goods to customers. Under the initiative, store employees will be given the option to deliver packages on their way home after work, in exchange for extra pay. They'll be given an app that allows them to input their routes, and an algorithm will plot the most efficient path. To take part, the employees will have to pass a background and vehicle check.

Comments

Re:Optional participation; keep context

[grahamsz]

Yeah I've seen a lot of people dismissing this but I think it's generally a pretty good idea. There are obvious issues with pay and insurance but i suspect many walmart employees will be happy to make their commute home be payable. Walmart will have to suitably figure out insurance because personal injury lawyers will jump at the chance to list them as a defendant when traffic incidents happen, they've got much more incentive to get that right than the local pizza franchise.

Their real strength in ecommerce should be that they have a massive presence in nearly every locality in the country, yet you can order something off their website and it'll ship with UPS 2-day from the other side of the country (despite sitting on a shelf 3 miles away from me). Their giant store footprint is really their singular advantage over Amazon, of course they should play to it.

Great Googly Moogly

[rsilvergun]

is this an April Fools Joke? There's so much wrong with this I don't know where to begin? What about insurance? What if they hit somebody? What about mileage? There's no way Walmart will pay enough to account for that.

And what happens if they don't get enough "volunteers"? After all, the Walmart employees with Cars are the better off ones. I'm guessing pressure, hours cut, etc, etc.

Dear lord the working class is pooched. I mean, if it's come to this what next? I don't even have the words... We're no longer racing to the bottom, we've drilled through, struck oil and it's leaking into our ground water.