Walmart Is Asking Workers to Drop Off Packages on Their Way Home

If every employee delivers just one package, think of how much money Walmart will save!

Today in “we can probably blame Uber for this,” Walmart is inviting its employees to become delivery drivers and drop off packages on their way home from work:

Wal-Mart employees can now deliver your online orders on their way home from work

The app matches online order delivery addresses with employees’ driving routes home from work, built to minimize any more driving than what the employee would do anyway to get home. Delivering is completely voluntary, and the employees can choose when they want to deliver, how many packages they can take and what size.

You’ll probably wonder whether these people are being paid, and yes, they are:

Wal-Mart compensates the employees for it but declined to elaborate how it works.

But these workers are also using their own car, paying for their own car insurance, probably buying their own gas, etc. etc. etc. Walmart might be paying them for their time, but there’s a lot that Walmart doesn’t have to pay for.

As the CNBC article notes, the most expensive part of the delivery process is “the last mile”—that is, getting products that have been delivered to a centralized warehouse to all of those individual customers’ homes.

Looks like Walmart’s figured out one way to cut those costs. Let’s see if any other retailers ask their employees to take this idea for a test drive.

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