Walmart Announces Same-Day Drone Delivery in Six States | Hacker News Reader

Walmart Announces Same-Day Drone Delivery in Six States

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16 pointsddtaylor10 comments

How long until we see stories of packages being shot-down and stolen? I wish I was kidding. I welcome the future of drone package shooting as a sport!

99.9% of the time the drone is going to be worth way more than the package. Grabbing the cable and pulling the drone out of the sky for parts is more likely.

But what if you shot down 30 of them already? I suppose you could sell parts on the black market, but that would probably get you caught.

Eventually Wal-Mart starts sending out armed drones to protect the delivery drones. You'll need a constant supply of your own attack drones to fight against Wal-Mart's security drone. (Just kidding... I hope!)

This sounds ridiculous. How long did it take to see truck drivers taken hostage and payloads stolen?

Here’s a relevant article about a recent report from the FAA regarding Beyond Visual Line of Sight operations, one of the key regulatory hurdles to drone delivery: https://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/faa-publishes-uas-b...

The actual document (24.6 MB PDF is available from here: https://www.faa.gov/regulations_policies/rulemaking/committe...

Weight is obviously going to be the big limitation here but the delivery fee of $3.99 is extremely reasonable, both in time and gas saved. Going to guess they're operating this as a loss-leader for the time being.

https://corporate.walmart.com/newsroom/2022/05/24/were-bring...

I'm surprised Walmart got their drone service running before Amazon did. Can anyone comment on where we are with amazon's Prime Air?

Walmart is ruthless. I think with Amazon’s recent dominance people may discount Walmart but long term I am bull Walmart. They have a long, storied history of being the most brutal capitalists that recent history has ever seen. I think a great example of this is this old article: https://www.leanblog.org/2006/01/man-who-said-no-to-wal-mart...

I could absolutely see a reality where they went all in on drone tech simply because Amazon treated it as a secondary possibility.

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