From The Washington Post:
Walmart’s newest tactic in its fight against online giant Amazon: enlisting its employees to deliver online orders on their way home from work.
The idea, Walmart executives said Thursday, is to cut costs on the so-called last-mile of deliveries, when packages are driven to customers’ homes, often the most expensive part of the fulfillment process.
“It just makes sense: We already have trucks moving orders from fulfillment centers to stores for pickup,” Marc Lore, chief executive of Walmart’s e-commerce business and the founder of Jet.com, said in a blog post Thursday afternoon. “Those same trucks could be used to bring ship-to-home orders to a store close to their final destination, where a participating associate can sign up to deliver them to the customer’s house.”
. . . .
Employees will be paid extra for the voluntary program, and offered overtime pay as necessary to make the deliveries, Walmart spokesman Ravi Jariwala said Thursday.
“Walmart is uniquely qualified, uniquely positioned, to be able to offer this,” he said, adding that 90 percent of Americans live within 10 miles of a Walmart store. “There is really strong overlap between where our associates are already heading after work and where those packages need to go.”
. . . .
“The practice seems ripe for abuse if the company does not compensate workers for the full cost of their journey, the expenses related to gas, car depreciation, and potential problems like accidents, tickets or parking expenses,” said Stephanie Luce, a labor professor at the City University of New York. “Like other ‘gig economy’ type jobs, there is a potential to benefit workers — but in reality, most of the benefits accrue to the employer, not the employee.”
. . . .
Thursday’s announcement comes as Walmart doubles down on its online business, where sales grew 63 percent in the first quarter of this year. The company — long the country’s largest retailer — has taken aggressive steps in the past year, beginning with its $3.3 billion purchase of Jet.com to compete with Amazon.com, which accounts for about 33 percent of the country’s online sales. (Jeffrey P. Bezos, the founder of Amazon, owns The Washington Post.)
Link to the rest at The Washington Post
I thought this was a gag post. I can’t imagine how this would become twisted which it would. I did my time under the wally world umbrella an d thought my brain would explode on more than one occasion.
If the employees get compensated that is a good thing for Walmart and the employees. Amazon does not have a monopoly on ideas.
I’ve had several deliveries from Amazon lately that came via regular car and uniformed person. Also my PrimeNow always come in regular car, so in theory, that’s a great idea.
In practice, Walmart has a long history of turning good ideas into bad impacts…so I wouldn’t trust this. I no longer shop there at all anyway.
Those (I believe) are actual other business entities, or formal independent contractors. Ones with commercial riders on their insurance policies, etc. IIRC, wasn’t there an article a while back on Amazon using Uber (or maybe it was Lyft) drivers?
In my state, if you regularly use your vehicle for your employer’s benefit, you are supposed to have a “for business use” rider on your auto insurance policy.
The whole deal looks pretty shady under my state’s law; should an employee be involved in a collision or other problem while on the employer’s business, the employer is still liable, whether the employee was “on the clock” or not.
In this case, they are explicitly “on the clock” with Walmart. There is going to be a lot of pain for them in this. Will the typical injury lawyer go after the just-barely-over-minimum-wage employee for the excess damages above their liability policy limit – or will they go after deep pockets Walmart? Do I need to answer that question?
Do I smell more than a whiff of desperation here? 🙂
(And I think this “employee-friendly” tactic won’t help much for Wally World’s bottom line or attempt to compete with — and usurp — Zon.)
And, of course, as we all know, WaPo is biased towards Zon, quite unlike the NYC Big Pub cheerleaders and ADS fanboys.
If you’re trying to compete with Amazon, I don’t think you’re going to get there by looking at ‘cost-cutting measures’ like this. This tells me they’re trying to compete without actually committing to it financially.
As long as it’s voluntary and they are duly paid for the extra work, I don’t see a problem.
In fact, I’ve been wondering for years why local malls/shops haven’t figured out how to cooperate to deliver same-day to local buyers, and by doing so disincentivize 2-Day Prime for the same. For easily transportable items, it can’t be that hard to figure this out.
Malls and large chain stores seem to me way late to this local service same-day option. It amazes me that they haven’t organized something like this still…or years ago.
I know WalMart has had the curbside service up and running, but considering what a nuisance the parking lots are at Walmarts locally, that isn’t enough to make me want to buy from them. If they can get something to me on the same or next day without a big added fee, that would be a game-changer.
Yeah, but it won’t scale. Walmart hires/works the fewest number of warm bodies they can. So they might be able to get a few volunteers to make a few deliveries, but any sudden ‘rush’ will overload the system and deliveries won’t happen due to not enough warm bodies to make those deliveries. So either lots of upset customers and/or bosses browbeating their workers to ‘do more deliveries’.
That, and lawyers. Always lawyers…
Those guys in Bentonville are so dumb. I can’t believe they didn’t know this stuff.
I worked for Walmart briefly.
I think I speak for all current and ex-employees, the amount of dumb coming out of Bentonville is astounding.
To be honest though, most big outfits have stupid crap coming down the pipe all the time.
I agree with Marika on Walmart curbside pick up being a nuisance. The parking lot is a pain, and even though I’m within 3 miles of a Walmart, simply going there and coming back (by the time it’s all said and done) is at least a 20 to 30 minute exercise. And if I’m going to drive all the way there, that I feel like maybe I should go inside and pick up some other things. Which is precisely what I was trying to avoid. Curbside is definitely not a substitute for same day or 2 day delivery. I have a home office, but it’s still a disruption to take care of something like this when I could simply get it delivered. ‘
As far as Walmart employee delivery – I have no idea what sort of infrastructure or insurance they plan to put into place. But waiting for volunteers to make themselves available can’t possibly allow for planning promised delivery times.
I have found one demographic that really loves the curbside delivery: mothers with kids in car seats. Not having to wrangle small child out of and back into the car seat alone is a massive time and frustration saver, and allows her to pick up the groceries on the way home from other errands.
I would hope that employees who don’t have reliable access to a vehicle won’t be forced into this program.
They will. Walmart doesn’t care if they have a car. All they want is same day delivery.
The employees will be forced to walk in the dark in snow storms, hauling a forty pound load of deliveries. That’s how companies take advantage of employees.
Those with mild arthritis will be the first ones forced out the door. The second group shoved into the storm will be single mothers who take the bus to pick up their kids at day care.
This is an example of what is called shitposting.
And so is my post, sorta. 😉
And they talk about Amazon taking advantage of employees. Convinces me to think twice before using Walmart.
If an employee finds it in his self-interest to deliver the packages, how is that taking advantage of him?
Not everything works like an Ayn Rand novel, unfortunately.
And if they don’t get enough ‘volunteers’ they’ll make it non-voluntary. (Hey, if they can ADS then I can WDS – right? 😉 )
They could make it voluntary but still compel workers to sign up by cutting hours across the board and in order to make up the hours, they’ll have to “voluntarily” offer to deliver packages.
For employees, they’re going to have trouble with their car insurance if they deliver packages for work. Who is going to cover them if they have an accident? Even if employees *don’t deliver on their way home from work, try convincing your insurance company that you weren’t doing that when you had an accident leaving work. Once it becomes common practice for employees to do deliveries, they onus is on them to prove that they weren’t doing it even though they work at Walmart.
The whole idea is win-win for Walmart, lose-lose for employees.
It gives the head office someone else to point blame at when it all goes wrong.
The insurance problem occurred to me as well. The difference between commuter rates and commercial rates is substantial. Possibly more than the employees would earn doing this incidental work.
I think they are opening themselves up for a world of hurt.
I have on occasion done “out of office” errands for an employer. Pick up someone from another office at the airport, run some papers over to a lawyer during lunch hour. However – and this is a crucial difference – these were not part of my employer’s “regular business.”
IIRC, there have been some lawsuits over things that occurred when an employee was doing their employers regular business and not under their direct control. (Such as night deposits at the bank, etc.) I do know that pizza chains do not hire delivery drivers – they contract with “independents” – and there have been some attempts to breach that “wall of separation,” too.