Wal-Mart may get customers to deliver packages to online buyers | Hacker News Reader

Wal-Mart may get customers to deliver packages to online buyers

reuters.com

41 pointsdanso46 comments

Wal-Mart would offer a discount on the customers' shopping bill, effectively covering the cost of their gas in return for the delivery of packages, he added.

Eh, I think they are going to have to offer more than just a break-even on gas to get me interested in going out of my way to deliver a package. But I guess they can try it.

I actually don't see this working at all. Who is liable for the "loss" of deliveries in transit? If the person delivering the order causes a traffic accident, is Wal-Mart partly liable? Will they be checking insurance and driving records before letting someone deliver for them?

It would have to work more like a pizza delivery situation, where the drivers are actually employees, with a driving history check and insurance, though perhaps using their personal vehicles.

This is why they will eventually just make their already-much-put-upon employees do these deliveries on their way home from work. Probably with no compensation beside, "congratulations you get to keep your job for another couple of days!"

I feel like everything you mentioned is easily worked out once you understand their customer. Assuming they want to go through with the plan:

Eh, I think they are going to have to offer more than just a break-even on gas to get me interested in going out of my way to deliver a package. But I guess they can try it.

You are not likely the person they will be targeting to make deliveries. A lot of their customers barely make ends meet, if at all. Assuming they make a delivery close to their current residence, getting their gas paid for round trip to walmart, even if only a few dollars is a huge amount of money to them.

I don't know driving liability law, and it varies by state, but a company as large as Walmart can either self-insure or contract out insurance. This is a solvable economic relationship that can be worked out.

It would have to work more like a pizza delivery situation, where the drivers are actually employees, with a driving history check and insurance, though perhaps using their personal vehicles.

That would probably work, but isn't part of their stated idea. Every nit-pick here can be easily solved by professional management. The only question is whether after solving all those issues, it is economical or not.

> You are not likely the person they will be targeting to make deliveries. A lot of their customers barely make ends meet, if at all. Assuming they make a delivery close to their current residence, getting their gas paid for round trip to walmart, even if only a few dollars is a huge amount of money to them.

The problem with this is that the Walmart customers who "barely make ends meet" are not that likely to live near the Walmart customers who would pay for this service. It might work in urban areas (where there is less physical separation between socioeconomic classes), but Walmart isn't as prevalent in such places, not to mention the urban poor often don't have cars anyway.

For example, I know that I would be willing to pay for this service. But there is no one anywhere near my residence who would be willing to do this for the money.

As someone originally from a very rural state, it's actually quite common for the poor and the well-to-do to live pretty close together, especially near highways, so the logistics makes sense.

Yeap, exactly. I used to live in Orlando, FL. People in lower income neighborhoods live 100 meters from high income neighborhoods. Additionally, you should not rule out low income people delivering to other low income people.

I would think they'd want their own trucks. Here's why:

For one, it'd stave off comparisons with the teen pizza delivery driver (I like delivery pizza as much as the next guy, but let's face it, they're not a professional-looking workforce)

And there's also the advertising/marketing benefits of having your delivery vehicles (with big Walmart logos on them) being seen in traffic & neighborhoods. FedEx & UPS count that as a competitive advantage.

It also gives them a future business opportunity to compete with FedEx/UPS. Walmart already has a highly efficient distribution system. This would be an extension of it .. they'd just have to add package sorting capabilities (if they're smart, they'd standardize on a few different box sizes).

There are already courier companies employing essentially casual employees. No uniform or anything like that; these people use their own cars and simply pick up a stack of parcels in the morning and deliver them as best they can over the day. No reason why a company as large as WalMart can't manage that, and by paying these people with a discount on their shopping instead of money, WalMart effectively pays less. Add in that WalMart already has established locations, so they won't need to rent distribution centres, and they're laughing.

Eight or ten years ago Amazon tried using Parcelnet, and what a desaster it was. Parcelnet, if anyone remembers it, was Moms With Vans that were contracted by (I think) Selfridge's to deliver their orders. If that sounds iffy, that's because it was. Packages would never arrive, there was no number to complain, it was awful.

It's possible that Walmart are going for a rerun, but I wouldn't recommend it.

They were rebranded as Hermes Europe and they still operate. Amazon uses them today.

paying these people with a discount on their shopping instead of money

Something the IRS will likey have a problem with....

My first instinct is to dismiss this as a crazy idea, except that if the CEO is speaking publicly about it with a major world news organization, then it's probably past the "crazy idea someone wrote on a bar napkin one night" stage.

The biggest WTF, of course, is how do you insure against fraud and liability...but courier services have presumably come up with a system, and so Walmart "just" has to innovate on industrializing the system. So it's obviously not a trivial task, but Walmart (and its competitors, such as Amazon) have already managed the seemingly-impossibly complicated logistics behind every other part of the shipping, cataloging, and, in Walmart's case, the manufacturing process. Those parts don't seem innovative because the everyday person doesn't have to think about them...however, the everyday person can relate to delivering items to strangers and all the ways that could possibly go wrong, so of course that task seems even more impossible and unlikely...from our perspective.

It may very well be harder than the logistics Walmart has already mastered...but I don't really know that, so I guess Walmart deserves some benefit of the doubt.

In any case, it'll be interesting to see how a behemoth can reinvent itself in this space...sure, startups have the nimbleness of no legacy baggage...but it's possible a company with hundreds of millions of dollars to throw at the problem may also be enough to spur the needed innovation.

"how do you insure against fraud and liability"

A large pool of customers with known purchasing and probable credit histories? Travelling through neighbourhoods with known income, employment, substance abuse, and past crime statistics? I'm presuming this will be presented as a perk to the store's "best" customers. Insuring this would not be insurmountable.

My first comment was in jest, but perhaps it wasn't making the point clearly enough:

The children of the 2020's will find it inconceivable that you DON'T deliver some package to your neighbors on the way home from the grocery store :)

We are moving in the direction of cost-cutting and streamlining so much that many jobs really are going away, the prices of goods are dropping, and fewer people are working. Who would have thought, twenty years ago, that YOU would be the checkout person, and the bagger, at the supermarket? (Yes, non-USA people, they still have bag boys at many supermarkets!)

The service jobs that are not being replaced by robots, are being done by you, in the name of "self service" to lower costs - and they pass the savings on to you! ;-)

This move makes perfect sense and it is a natural progression of the trends that have been happening over the past years and decades.

I'm not convinced. The self-service registers at the Walmart near me took up nearly 1/3rd of the space at the front of the store. Well people suck at checking out. Either they don't know how the machines work, move too slow, or have a problem with the scanner/price check. The lines were getting long and people were getting pissed at having to wait because the damn machine didn't think you actually put the bottle in the bag.

A few years ago that Walmart moved into an even bigger store. Before it was consumer products and some groceries. Now it's 50/50 with a bank, Macdonalds, and dentist. That self-checkout line has been reduced to 1 lane with 4 machines.

The cashier may be disappearing soon but it's not being replaced by self-service. Compared to a good cashier they are ridiculously slow. If anything they will be replaced with good computer vision or RFID.

I had the same reservations when I first saw these machines, the software was buggy and hard to use and people just weren't used to it.

However a few stores near me have now removed human checkouts entirely and just have 1 member of staff floating around to deal with problems.

The queues are dramatically smaller, the software has gotten better and people are now more used to using it.

They are still slower than a human checkout for very large quantities of shopping, but if I want to make a very large order it's easier just to do it online anyway.

However a few stores near me have now removed human checkouts entirely and just have 1 member of staff floating around to deal with problems.

Like the Apple Store? Who has done away with the idea of checking out completely. I can see self checkout working at a boutique where you may buy half a dozen things and I've done it at the Boots, CVS, Apple store. But that bi-monthly food shopping trip, complete with coupons, is completely unworkable with those machines.

I've found my online shopping has actually decreased because I'm eating healthier. I'm eating more fresh veg and meats which you need to physically inspect. Plus, the online shops have a 60-100€ minimum and I can't plan that far in advanced.

This was at Tesco, if the queuing is short enough perhaps you don't need to buy so much stuff in one go and if delivery gets cheaper then online purchasing gets more attractive.

"Like the Apple Store? Who has done away with the idea of checking out completely. I can see self checkout working at a boutique "

Apple and boutique same thing high price and margins on the products (generally).

Important to factor in that at the Apple store the margins are extremely high. So this is not the local drugstore making pennies when selling razor blades.

You can't really lift the computers and desirable products and the other things come with enough margin to cover any theft. If you've ever priced some of either the add ons (like hard drives) laptop bags vs. what you can buy them on Amazon for you can see how much they are making and that well covers the cost of some shoplifting.

And on the Apple products even larger. An Apple lightning to 30 pin connector sells for $39. I wouldn't even want to guess how cheap this is to manufacture (I'm talking about marginal cost of course) in other words what their loss is if one is lifted.

Don't blame just the users. The machines suck. They take what should be a simple scan and swipe, and add latencies to everything to make it slow and painful.

Then they don't trust you (which perhaps makes sense), so if you do something off-script, it halts the entire process.

Self-checkout

Problem: Wal-Mart has an awful time getting cashiers to show up for work (apparently they aren't paying enough or aren't selective enough when hiring). But the shoppers keep showing up.

Solution: Let the shoppers run the check out.

An oddity in all of this is that Wal-Mart has been removing the self-checkouts from here in Canada.

The comment I got from a family member who is a contractor for them is that they removed them due to the fact that there was an increase in theft upon their installation. Having been unable to reign it in, they have since been removed and the express check-outs were doubled.

I don't know, there's a huge difference between self-service, in which I do something for myself instead of relying on an employee, and the idea presented here: doing something for someone else which normally would be performed by a paid employee. I care about getting gas into my car or getting myself groceries, and as a not-very-social person, I see some value in just doing it myself (edit: or at the very least, I don't mind). But what do I care about joe schmo down the street and the jazzercise DVD he ordered from Walmart? I am not remotely interested in dropping that off to him.

Maybe if Walmart wants to pay customers to do it? Just lump that in to their shipping fees? But then they're kindof employees at that point. Or at least something like a contractor.

BIG emphasis on "may":

  > This is at the brain-storming stage, but it's possible 
  > in a year or two," said Jeff McAllister, senior vice 
  > president of Walmart U.S. innovations.

  > Indeed, the likelihood of this being broadly adopted 
  > across the company's network of more than 4,000 stores 
  > in the United States is low, according to Matt Nemer, a 
  > retail analyst at Wells Fargo Securities.

This is a remarkably bad idea. What happens when someone who's delivering a package gets robbed? Think that's a remote possibility? Pizza delivery guys get robbed constantly.

Also, it says a lot about Wal-Mart's opinion of its customers that it thinks the customers would be willing to do this for cheaper than any other method Wal-Mart could use to get this done.

Wal-Mart is big enough that they can take those thefts as a loss.

I see it working. If done right, it could leverage into neighborliness. It should be marketed that way. I can see people doing it just to have an excuse to meet their neighbors.

You misunderstand the problem. It's not the loss of the $20 of goods or whatever that are lost. Obviously they can absorb that.

It's the lawsuits due to the emotional/physical trauma of being robbed while delivering for Wal-Mart.

There's that, but I'm sure they'd have lawyers work out some sort of indemnification. The first media reports would need careful PR handling.

I see this as something similar to what AirBnB went through. It's not unprecedented.

AirBnB is miniscule compared to Wal-Mart, though. Not even a blip.

The ambulance chasers would be all over this.

Not to mention widespread fraud. It's just a dumb idea.

Casual courier companies already exist. Employees are paid daily, piecework. They drive their own cars and pay their own fuel. They just pick up parcels at the start of the day and deliver them as best they can. This already exists, so whatever objections you have must have already been surmounted.

> This already exists, so whatever objections you have must have already been surmounted.

There's a huge difference between some fly-by-night operations working in this model already existing and a company the size of Wal-Mart taking it on.

Additionally there's a huge difference between a person coming in daily as a contract employee and a company like Wal-Mart recruiting its customers at the checkout.

The difference is lawsuits and liability when something bad happens. If it's a small company there's not so much assets to go after. If it's Wal-Mart the ambulance chasers will come out of the woodwork.

In the future, all humans will be employees of either Wal-Mart or Google.

Or products.

A startup, from Quebec, is working on this: http://gofellow.com/

I like it, could be big

Maybe Wal-Mart is not going to be as involved as it seems.

Perhaps they will just set up a framework for peer-to-peer contact. If they leave the agreement solely between the deliverer and the recipient it should remove much of their liability risk.

They could then reward people based upon positive reviews by recipients.

Wal-mart is trying very hard to eliminate employees as quickly as possible, but it may backfire.

http://business.time.com/2013/03/27/hey-walmart-its-hard-to-...

200 days ago, I suggested this exact idea:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4475730

I wonder if Walmart saw the post...

It's all fun and games until someone uses delivery to scope out your house for theft.

Or delivers your items covered in dog hair.

There's a reason why people use professional delivery.

Walmart: Finding ways to not pay a fair wage for work done since 1962.

I can see this failing in so many ways.

What happens when you deliver a package and the recipient thinks you're an intruder and shoots you?

Presumably the same thing that happens now when a stranger knocks on your door and you murder them. You get arrested for murder and go to jail.

Yeah, that wasn't my point though. You're basically making those people doing delivery's contractors. I probably should of asked something like: what happens when you go deliver something and you fall on their slippery sidewalk? Walmart is at that point responsible, right?

No. Whilst I am guessing which legal system you come under, if it's the one I suspect, the owner of the property has the responsibility to ensure reasonable levels of safety. Walmart does not have a responsibility to maintain the sidewalk outside someone else's house. If the last dozen people delivering there all were injured and WalMart knew about it, then you might have some kind of case.

Does that frequently happen with the UPS, mail, or pizza guy? Because these are deliveries that you have ordered. You should expect someone. Also, I'm willing to bet unannounced visitors such as religious organizations have a similarly low incidence of being shot for knocking on someone's door.

Intruders don't frequently knock and wait for you to answer.

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