EAST BRUNSWICK, N.J. (Reuters) - Standing before an audience of 14,000 people last year, Walmart Inc executives described a radical plan to help it fend off Amazon.com Inc and other online delivery services from stealing its customers.
Walmart’s own store employees would bring online orders directly to shoppers’ homes after completing their usual shifts of up to nine hours on the sales floors. Aiming to lower the retailer’s shipping costs by tapping its massive workforce, the program was part of a multi-pronged strategy to boost its $11.5 billion U.S. ecommerce business and tackle one of the biggest challenges in retail: the so-called “last mile” of delivering goods to online customers.
Its workers, meanwhile, could earn extra money on top of their hourly pay, which starts at $11 an hour.
“Just imagine associates all over the world delivering orders to customers on their way home,” Marc Lore, head of Walmart’s e-commerce operations, said at its annual meeting in June 2017. “That can be a real game-changer.”
But months later, Walmart quietly retreated from its original vision for the pilot program - launched in New Jersey and Arkansas - and ended it altogether in January, according to company documents obtained by Reuters and interviews with more than two dozen Walmart employees.
The story behind the foundering employee delivery initiative, which has not been reported, offers insight into Walmart’s ongoing attempts to find unconventional ways to close the gap with Amazon in the game of cheap, rapid, doorstep delivery of packages. According to Walmart data, people who shop in stores and become online customers spend nearly twice as much as those who shop at one or the other.
Here in New Jersey, Walmart started the program with the idea that store employees could courier all items that
