If you live within a 50-mile radius of Walmart’s headquarters in Arkansas, you can now get items dropped off by a drone.
Walmart is teaming up with drone delivery company Zipline to parachute packages of goods to shoppers.
“It’s unbelievably exciting. We’ve been working towards this day for many, many years,” Liam O’Connor Zipline’s CEO said.
“We have done over 220,000 commercial deliveries in overseas markets,” O’Connor said. “For us, the promise of ultrafast delivery is really to give access to all kinds of communities to all kinds of products.”
When you place an order online, your item is packaged in a specially designed box with a parachute. First, your item is scanned, then they install a parachute and load the package.
Once the package is loaded, they load the drone battery, do a final inspection, and launch the drone for delivery. The drones can drop payloads within a 50-mile radius of Pea Ridge, Arkansas.
“If our customers enjoy the service, we’ll scale it so in future holidays this is probably going to play a really great part in getting things in a hurry,” Said Tom Ward. He runs Walmart’s Last Mile delivery operation.
“Customers expect us to save them money, they need us to save them time, and when it comes to saving time, what better way to do it than via a drone,” Ward said.
