Walmart stumbles with its 'last mile' package delivery plan
reuters.com
reuters.com
All of which the story says adds up to $15.40 for each 10 miles of five packages, not counting OT. After a week one employee said she got $100 after ~12 deliveries.
All so you can spend an extra 30 minutes at your job waiting for someone else's groceries, which you will then spend 2 hours to deliver, by hand, to their (assuming) nice looking house with their nice looking family, as you then trudge back to your apartment and sit on your Walmart couch, in your Walmart clothes, eating your Walmart food and watching your Walmart TV.
If that's not depressing I don't know what is.
*edited for typo
That just means working for Amazon is even more abysmal. Last mile logistics is shitty to human beings period.
He’ll make a whole lot more though, UPS is unionized and widely regarded as a pretty good place to work. Better shut them down.
The problem with these services is that they are very slow. The hand-off at the post office adds a day. Additionally these are considered economy services without a delivery guarantee by the carriers so they will wait until they have a full trucks worth of these before sending them on a leg.
Wal-Mart is trying to get to same day delivery and bringing everything to the local post office for them to deliver would add at least a day.
Furthermore those USPS economies suffer a bit once packages exceed 1 lb. it’s often too big for a letter carrier to take on their route - so they’d be delivered through the priority mail network which is often a different driver than your daily mail man and does not deliver to every house every day.
I mean, that's a rhetorical question. Obviously they'd both prefer to monopolize a for-profit alternative to USPS... but it seems short-sighted
“Back in 2006, Congress imposed a huge and unprecedented mandate requiring that the Postal Service pre-fund future retiree health benefits for the next 75 years and do so within a decade – something no other public agency or private company is required to do.”
“As a direct result of pre-funding, USPS has reached its $15 billion debt limit. In 2005, the Postal Service was debt free. Today, it holds $15 billion in debt – all of it traceable to pre-funding. By forcing the Postal Service to use all of its borrowing capacity making these annual payments, Congress has prevented it from investing in new infrastructure, products and services to better serve American homes and businesses.”
http://www.deliveringforamerica.com/infographic-the-truth-ab...
So basically never?
Also, the legislation was sponsored by a Republican (Thomas “Tom” Davis III Sponsor. Representative for Virginia's 11th congressional district).
In 2005, the Postal Service was debt free. Today, it holds
$15 billion in debt – all of it traceable to pre-funding.
If I've promised an employee $X of retirement benefits based on years they've already worked, am I "debt free" by the definition of that article, or do I have $X of debt?
1) In order to account for something, you have to be able to measure it. Promising a population healthcare until they die requires you to know how much healthcare they will need and how much healthcare will cost, and since this is until they die, you need to know these numbers 30 to 70 years into the future.
I don't think anyone is capable of seeing that far into the future with any kind of reasonable certainty, especially not with healthcare. Therefore, it can't even be possible to "properly" account for this kind of promise, and consider the fact that pretty much every other non taxpayer funded organization has slashed and removed post retirement obligations due to skyrocketing healthcare costs and the inability to fund them.
2) According to the text of the legislation
https://www.govtrack.us/congress/bills/109/hr6407/text
Sec. 8909a. Postal Service Retiree Health Benefit Fund
The law requires funding of accrued benefits. I don't think it's unreasonable to require someone to set aside funds for something that has already been promised. In fact, I think the opposite is ridiculous, which is the way most government agencies work, and the USPS has worked with their pay as you go nonsense:
https://about.usps.com/who-we-are/financials/annual-reports/...
Basically, "pay" someone whatever you want now, and then actually pay for it later by raising taxes is what that means to me. I also consider it buying votes from the union members without having to increase current taxes. However, the fact that this type of law only went into effect for USPS does make me think some lobbyist of Fedex/UPS did a fantastic job.
3) The hundreds of billions of dollars of unfunded healthcare and defined benefit pensions from governments are evidence enough that whatever is going on in the benefit accounting world is not right. I know from sitting in on meetings that the people smart enough to calculate the liabilities aren't actually on the board, that's usually reserved for the uneducated policeman or firefighters and city council members who are exchanging union votes for benefits. Then they tell the actuarial what % return on investment to use to make the liabilities look smaller. Then the actuary puts a little notice in their report that says they don't agree with the unreasonable 8% return on investment assumption, but what difference does that make?
Also, in the pension consulting world, having funding for only 80% of the accrued liabilities is considered "fully funded". That is laughable. Look up what your city/county/state's funding ratios are.
In general, I simply point out the fact that no one can predict, with any reasonable accuracy, that far out into the future for something so complicated (lifespans, healthcare, investment returns, etc), so you can't really account for the liabilities in the first place. And from the fact that pretty much every single defined benefit pension that private organizations offered is no longer offered (due to strict funding requirements from ERISA and PPA laws, conveniently exempting taxpayer funded organizations), and the taxpayer funded ones that are very underfunded, you can surmise that the whole thing doesn't work. Too much money at play, too many ephemeral decision makers at the table who can pass the buck and reap the rewards, which all adds up to too much agency risk. Which, funnily enough, is never taken into account with these long term obligations.
How does this effect you in day to day life? Enjoy the deteriorating subway service, school systems, roadways, water quality, air quality, etc. as all that increased tax money goes towards these unfunded benefits for retired people.
If I could reliably predict which packages would come vs MI, I might never have to pay for Prime again.
You do realize that humans have toiled in misery, scraping by and fighting for their lives for 99.9999999% of our history right?
Everyone has to/should work and provide value for our society.
I dont understand why package delivery is so much worse than factory life, sitting infront of a computer 60 hours a week, etc..
I chalk this up to a niche percentage of the population that complains regardless of the situation.
>retail
>Restaurant
>outdoor/home
I dont get it, but people are choosing that job instead of higher paying jobs in different conditions.
I'm a big fan of letting employees decide rather than bystanders outside the industry make that judgement for them.
Is your best argument really "well they could be dying of cholera and starve all the time so it's not that bad"?
You can think critically while simultaneously using exaggerated figures for emphasis. Especially when the figure cannot be precise.
The argument is that these people are choosing to do this. They can choose to spend their time however they please. They know the full terms of the offer, and they choose to accept. There are people in the world who would cross oceans and deserts just to be able to have the opportunity to accept a similar job.
The poor in the USA live better than kings in other parts of the world.
It appears that Walmart for some reason thought that having their existing associates to do it "on the side" after their ordinary job will somehow be more efficient (or even just as efficient) than hiring people to actually do that (and just that) efficiently. Clearly this experience shows that it's not, and doing it in the way described in the article would reasonably cost much, much more than $2/package; and getting it done for "industry standard" prices would require doing it in the "industry standard" way.
Who will have higher route density ? UPS, which delivers orders for everybody wanting to ship to your neighborhood ? or Walmart, that only ships from Walmart, with it's measly share of e-commerce ?
It was probably always a risky proposition.
So what's the ideal way to test a risky proposition ? issue a big press release.
And now i'm curios: how is the stock price affected from this press release, and failure ? is it possible, that this kind of tactic(very common in big companies) is beneficial to the stock price , or maybe to the compensation of managers ?
The other advantage is that Wallmart sells the stuff we use a lot: cleaning things, toothpaste, diapers.
If Wallmart coupled delivery with the gangbuster of all 'monthly box of stuff' type business plans (whereby the 'stuff' is not a tester box of perfume, but literally the stuff you buy most often in a household) - they could win.
But the notion of getting employees to do this after shift is utterly beyond crazy.
Just hire people for this, focus hard on selling the feature in a region, get people to sign up to 'toothpaste every month' and 'milk and eggs every monday',
As a consequence of opening a large number of huge stores, the majority seem to be in suburbs / places where land is cheap. Not exactly high-density urban centers.
That's basically how I exist now (excluding the "Walmart" prefix).
I sit, I eat, I play video games, I'm somewhat dressed. What do you imagine people with a "nice looking house with their nice looking family" do on the weekends? The middle class doesn't have some secret club we all attend.
In an era of both decreased economic mobility (education and housing cost increases, lower high-income tax rates, lower effective taxes on generational wealth transfer) and increased commercial interest in and monetization of attention (adtech, gaming, peak content)...
Probably teaching their children how to be titans of industry and avoiding screens? (Or at least middle management)
> "...that would earn them $15.40 in compensation per package and fuel, before overtime pay."
$11 is just below the in-store FT min wage. The avg is more like $13 with 1.5x (overtime?) that would be $19.50 + $2 package and .54 per mile..
4 pks per night, 5 nights a week, driving 10 miles and taking 1 hr would then be $164.5 which is the income of an extra 12 hour shift for working an extra 5 hours...
P.S. (((4×2)+19.5+(.54×10))×5)÷13 = 12 hrs
Isn't the pay they're getting from this way better than their normal walmart job when you include the OT they'd be getting?
That's exactly what pizza, take out, Uber eats, news paper, usps delivery is about. Do you really think these delivery drivers make a lot more? Definitely more than Walmart but it's still not a lot.
I think if Walmart had a better pay model, things would have worked.
>If that's not depressing I don't know what is.
Unemployment, starvation, no TV.
Its weird, no one bats an eye when I work 60 hours a week but the moment a walmart worker works part time, we think that something is wrong with society.
Whoever spreads anti-walmart propaganda did fantastic work.
Meanwhile, the upstarts just don't do this. Whoever Amazon contracts out to (is it still LaserShip?) just doesn't care about attempting to break into my building. They show up at 9pm and ring the buzzer, then leave if I don't go downstairs and open the door quickly enough. They are getting better, though, as I've seen some random LaserShip packages laying around in the common area. But I still think "shipped via USPS, this will arrive" and "shipped by LaserShip, better go pick it up at B&H and cancel the Amazon order".
But anyway, expecting random Walmart employees to have the skills necessary to circumvent pesky locks is kind of unreasonable. When you do it every day for years you probably develop a process that works for each building you deliver to... but when it's a one-off thing for an extra $3... the customer probably isn't going to get their package. The customer that doesn't get their package is probably going to order from Amazon. Sorry, Walmart...
Remember those 'bufferbox' startups that got bought up by Google and then dissapeared ...
I observed that they simply ring every buzzer in the building until someone lets them in. Im curious if they use a different technique where you live?
To 'sign in' somewhere, a machine scans the card, cross-references the data the card is claiming with the face and a national ID database. Might also list public employment / contract records of relevance (like, carrier, emergency services, etc).
This would also let someone sign in to a common area and sub-select a portion of the local ACL to allow access to a locker for stuff.
The current attempts at such systems are clumsy, expensive, and insane due to the lack of such public infrastructure. The mechanical versions all invariably also involve that same level of public (or at least to local private entities with cameras) exposure.
Yes, there should also be regulations related to such a system. I don't mind it being used in the EXACT and pre-determined authentication method outlined but /abusing/ it or /caching/ data in ways that break down anonymity shouldn't be allowed.
This happens where I work, too.
They could have had the employees deliver for 10 hours of their 40 hour shift so they aren't exhausted while driving. Have the employees do it during the shift rather than after which is likely during rush hour. Give employees consistent routes they are familiar with. If there's a package to deliver ok that route...great. if not, then do the regular associates job. Company vehicles to reduce burden on your employees who make $11 an hour. Buy some Chevy Bolt that can be charged at Walmart. It's also hatchback so store lots of stuff. Plaster Walmart ads to increase visibility of the service. A clean looking new car will increase branding.
This is the largest retailer in the world...don't act like a poor startup.
Or the executive tells them I am the Big Boss and this will definitely work.
So then you have to have someone else on overlapping schedule to cover that portion of the shift whilst the original worker is away on delivery. But if there are no deliveries then cancel the overlap.
And if the deliveries are to occur mid-shift then the overlapper is on a split-shift schedule.
Eventually it becomes simpler to handle the deliveries outside the store shifts.
The vast majority of people have rapidly moved to purchasing things from Amazon, and this leaves Walmart in the dust. Yes, fakes are an issue etc. but most people don't know that. All they know is that Amazon is easy, they think it is cheap, and that Amazon will resolve any issues they have when e.g. getting bad items.
Amazon historically (and still kinda does) have a problem with getting perishables logistically to last-mile delivery points, whereas Walmart and Sam's Club have already figured this out and done it for a very long time. There are TONS of places in the U.S. that do not have a Whole Foods nearby, but have a Walmart or Sam's Club just a mile or so away.
But Amazon is quickly catching up with its acquisition of Whole Foods, etc., and Walmart seems incapable of letting consumers just pay more to actually get this service like Amazon or Instacart do.
I don't think getting groceries to store shelves counts as "last mile." The entire problem with last mile is that instead of delivering a truckload singular location, one is many delivering tiny shipments to scattered, irregular locations, which is substantially more time, labor, and fuel expensive, not to mention logistically more difficult.
We've got a pretty solid tech team, and always looking for more people to join. https://blog.picnic.nl/
PicNic is a bit puzzling for traditional retailers. I interact with C-levels execs of "traditional" retailers in Europe and very few have heard about PicNic. When they realize what PicNic achieved in the NL, basically "solving" the last mile problem they all have, they usually are quite impressed.
Obviously, last-mile delivery is highly country specific: sociology and urban planning/population density in the Netherlands is very different to any other European country. Attempt to roll out the PicNic model in Scandinavia (roughly the same population size) would be a completely different story.
As an outsider, I'm wondering what PicNic next move will be. My money is on an international expansion into Germany, starting with Dusseldorf and its lander (similar population density and size).
https://ecommercenews.eu/dutch-online-supermarket-picnic-exp...
Indeed some things work great in the Netherlands which might not work well in other places. But even if we have to change some parts of the delivery model to adapt to other markets, I think the high level concept has a high chance of working.
Eventually it’s a robot doing the drive through pickup. You just load the items into a trunk which automatically opens.
But I always liked the idea of streamlined pickup not last mile in-home delivery.
Most UK supermarkets have an online delivery service (even Iceland!) You pick a delivery slot for a certain price (off peak is cheaper) and then choose what you want.
They have store assistants with specific trolleys with plastic boxes for each order and fill up as they walk around the store. Boxes get loaded to a specially designed truck and delivered in the time slot.
Works pretty well, unless you're this person https://www.reddit.com/r/britishproblems/comments/2sxjiv/tes...
I thought it was a little odd at the time till the next time I was in the store and noticed the frozen garlic cubes were right next to the frozen mixed veg. So rather than apply logic and grab some other type of easy garlic they just grabbed the thing next to it. I actually facepalmed.
They clearly just dont have the density of orders for this to work. Theres videos on youtube of the amazon flex app, a 2 hour shift with a car full of boxes is mostly within a couple of blocks.
P.S. Their new website homepage doesn't show any prices. It feels kind of dishonest.
I suspect Amazon-owned companies are unlikely experiment with the particular structure Walmart is trying. It feels like Walmart is trying to solve a very particular problem that most other companies might not have.
Aren't there grocery stores in North America trying that approach? For all they know it might prompt a startup to actually solve the last mile problem for them, in much the same way as there's a startup or three out there that offer restaurant deliveries for places that don't support it out of the box.
I was on a flight with the founder in 2000 one time telling them how much I loved it and making suggestions about what is love to see, but also expressing how surprised I was that they could make a profit... They folded soon after...
I still remember the last time I bought from them: Ran on DVD
> Walmart’s associate delivery pilot program [...] started with store managers pitching employees an unusual new way to boost pay. Those who passed background checks could moonlight as drivers for the Walmart.com delivery service, they said.
> Fourteen of the sixteen Walmart employees told Reuters that they were put off by the program’s poor compensation. And all of them expressed concern over who would be responsible if they got into an accident or if merchandise was lost.
I can't imagine they'd get away with it in the end, with all the "Uber drivers are employees" rulings. And it does seem like version 2 of the program is hourly, without overtime.
The article mentions billions put into figuring out how to tackle on Amazon success. Here is the plan, free of charge:
Ask anyone why they chose Amazon over Wallmart, here is the answer: Both Amazon and Walmart has large range of goods, but Walmart lacks in reviews; offer perks and discounts (on products you have problems to sell) to those "good Wallmarters" who are willing to spend their time reviewing products online and you fix half of the problem. Make reviewing possible only to person who purchase a product from Wallmart to compete with horrible fake reviews that Amazon is plagued with.
- Have ONE designated person (or few people) delivering per store and made it their full-time job to deliver. The reasons I hate going to Wallmart are: 1) lack of short-distance parking lots [takes me 10 minutes to find a spot, sorry I'm lazy]. 2) confusion of where a product is [take me extra time to walk and find an isle]. 3) checkout time and lines are ridiculous [being 24-hour open doesn't mean much when there is only one clerk at the night shift, so waiting time is the same at rush hour]
- So have that ONE designated person: have their own reserved parking spot, have them handheld access to know where products are, have them skip checkout since products are paid online. Have them smart online app to deliver throughout the day, back and forth as many times as sophisticated algorithm of said app decides its the wise route possible.
You welcome, Wallmart!
It may have worked much better if they didn't comingle the jobs, and had dedicated horus for deliveries separate from giving rides.
Was Blockbuster killed by streaming? Or Netflix swapping rental from an ad hoc retail to a delivery subscription model?
Both, together.
My last Blockbuster rental was the time I forgot to return a Blockbuster movie before vacation, by the time I returned, the late fees were more than the price of the movie ($30 or $40 iirc). I never went back.