Walmart Drone Delivery May Happen Sooner Than Later

Walmart is in the testing phase of making deliveries of groceries via drone. Could we be seeing drone grocery deliveries coming to Cheyenne in the near future?

The best answer to that is probably...maybe. As the business of grocery deliveries has increased exponentially due to the ongoing pandemic, Walmart has partnered with the drone-delivery company Flytrex, and will test drone deliveries of groceries in the market of Fayettevile, North Carolina.

The delivery service will be available to bring 'select grocery and household essential items' to its customers. The move to test the new service comes after Walmart saw their e-commerce sales double during the last quarter, mainly due to the pandemic. Online retailers such as Amazon and Target have seen surges in their sales as well. Amazon has also recently received FAA approval for their own drone delivery.

In a recent news release, Walmart said:

We know that it will be some time before we see millions of packages delivered via drone. That still feels like a bit of science fiction, but we're at a point where we're learning more and more about the technology that is available and how we can use it to make our customers' lives easier.

Hopefully all goes well with the drone delivery tests in Fayetteville so that will lead to regional and nationwide expansion of the service at some point. As long as the drone deliveries don't make Walmart like the fictional drone delivery company, Gryzzl, from the show 'Parks & Recreation'. In that instance, the drones would deliver promotional personalized items that the company would only know to deliver because they were spying on their customers. Luckily, that was all fiction, but it made for a very humorous premise and you can watch a clip from the episode here.