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When Amazon Prime launched in 2005, its promise of free two-day shipping sounded almost extravagant (Jeff Bezos even described it as feeling like an "indulgent luxury" ). Over the next two decades, two days became one day, then same day, then a few hours. This year, Amazon began offering one-hour delivery on more than 90,000 products in some U.S. cities, alongside a three-hour option and an eye-popping 30-minute or less Amazon Now service.
The rest of retail has spent years trying to catch up. Now it increasingly has.
Walmart says it can deliver to 95% of U.S. households in three hours or less. In May, it began more prominently offering 30-minute-or-less delivery across 33 markets, with more than 100,000 eligible items ranging from groceries and prescriptions to electronics and pet food. Home Depot will bring tools and supplies in as little as an hour . Target offers same-day delivery to more than 80% of the country. Even Dollar Tree is on Uber Eats .
Amazon spent decades turning that "indulgent luxury" into something closer to an expectation. The result is a retail economy increasingly reorganizing itself around the idea that waiting is optional.
The store becomes the warehouse
Walmart's ability to catch up comes from something that once looked like a weakness in the age of Amazon: its stores.
Instead of treating those thousands of locations only as places where customers shop, Walmart can use them as miniature fulfillment centers already stocked with food, medicine, electronics and household goods. The physical footprint that once seemed expensive compared with an online-only rival is now what lets Walmart put merchandise within a short drive of most of the country.
And the clock keeps shrinking. In its latest quarterly results , Walmart said fast-delivery volume rose 48%, while fee-based fast deliveries reached a record 37% of all orders fulfilled from stores. Sub-30-minute delivery has now expanded to 38 U.S. markets. At the same time, Walmart U.S. e-commerce sales rose 24%, its tenth straight quarter of growth above 20%.
That growth helps explain why the rest of retail is trying to turn its stores into the same kind of delivery infrastructure. Nearly all of Target's roughly 2,000 stores support same-day pickup services, while more than 80% of Americans can get Target orders delivered the same day.
Home Depot offers same-day delivery on thousands of products from its website and delivery in as little as an hour through Instacart, DoorDash and Uber Eats. Those apps can pull products from more than 2,000 Home Depot locations.
The model also means retailers do not have to build an Amazon-size delivery operation themselves. Uber Eats brought nearly 9,000 Dollar Tree stores onto its platform last year. Target-owned Shipt o ffers same-day delivery from more than 100 retailers. Instacart says its marketplace now connects more than 2,200 retail banners representing nearly 100,000 stores.
What do you need right now?
Faster delivery is also beginning to change what people buy online. Online shopping once came with an implicit tradeoff. It was easier than going to the store, but if you needed something immediately, you got in the car.
Thirty-minute delivery means that is no longer the case. Walmart says customers who see the faster option increasingly use it for immediate needs like batteries, party supplies, cold and flu medicine, coffee pods, dog food and forgotten meal ingredients.
That could ultimately mean fewer reasons to walk into a store, while making the store itself more valuable. A retail location no longer has to attract a customer through the doors to make a sale.
Walmart's first retail revolution helped pull shopping out of downtowns and into big-box stores. This version may be less destructive to the businesses themselves. Fast delivery could help keep stores open by giving them more ways to make a sale.
But it could still produce a quieter kind of hollowing out. The stores may survive, even thrive, while serving more customers who rarely walk through the doors. The commercial activity remains. The foot traffic, chance encounters and sense of a store as part of neighborhood life may not.
Amazon had to build that proximity from scratch, adding smaller fulfillment centers closer to customers so it could keep cutting delivery times. Its brick-and-mortar rivals already had thousands of buildings in those neighborhoods. They just had to find a new use for them.
Amazon, meanwhile, is still trying to speed up deliveries. Expanding what is technically and legally possible, Amazon says it plans to expand drone delivery to around 500 U.S. cities and towns by the end of the year.
For years, retailers worried that Amazon would make their stores obsolete. Instead, the stores may be what let them compete in the world Amazon created.
