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Comment by hef19898 | Hacker News Reader

hef19898

That is maybe the first sign of brick and mortar retail finally waking up. Considering that technically they have one fulfillment center in every small town they should be able to achieve really short lead times out of these. Fulfillment Centers obviously being all their stores. While it is a non-trivial thing to connect all these stores to last mile courier services it is not necessarily overly complex.

Just what that means for Amazon and retail will be seen. I for my part won't be surprised if Amazon will change its focus more to Walmart. In turn that could open opportunities for new competitors.

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> That is maybe the first sign of brick and mortar retail finally waking up.

Hasn't Walmart been inching into this space for a while? I already cross-shop with Amazon all the time, and for me Walmart's delivery is often quicker than Amazon's already.

Ya I order from Walmart online all the time for dry food, for years now. Their delivery wasn't next day, but usually a few days which 99/100 times for me is more than fine.

Walmart, yes. But at least in Europe (France and Germany at least), the last mile is still outsourced to the customer. Giving all the smaller delivery services in every city retailers always had the possibility to offer these services. That they didn't allowed Amazon to become as big and successful. Still, Amazon executed almost perfect on that opportunity.

Since I always wondered how it would look like if that window closes I am happy that I might get a first glimpse.

>Hasn't Walmart been inching into this space for a while?

Yup. An aircraft carrier cannot turn on a dime but when it finally comes around it's bad news for anyone in its way.

Yeah they bought Jet for about three billion dollars cash in 2016, for their delivery network. See point two on https://blog.walmart.com/business/20160919/five-big-reasons-...

The 5000 sq ft in the back of every Walmart is nowhere near being a fulfillment center. It's already full of items for the low turn-around shelves in the store. Instead, they'll be relying on their warehouses to handle this change. They were already dicking around with modifying scheduled loads to accommodate the internet sales orders, back in 2016. This will just be more of the same, really.

I'm guessing the more complex part of the operation is inventory management. The optimal way to stock a warehouse is different than the optimal way to stock shelves, and that has knock-on effects all the way down the supply chain. Plus, the inventory tracking in a physical store that is exposed to consumers is less robust in general.

Generally speaking, inventories go up with the number of warehouses. Plus the uncertainty of quantities and the state of goods in a store. On the other hand, Walmart used to be the model case for cross docking, so their Supply Chain isn't too bad. And stores still have some local inventory in the background. Not much, but it is there and can be used and much closer controlled.

That this isn't easy was proven by Amazon's issues integrating Whole Foods. And Amazon is good at these things.

A major hurdle to that is finding the space to pick and pack then organize the packages for pickup by whatever delivery company they create or partner with.

I saw what Target's same day pickup / two day shipping workstation looked like on Black Friday last year. It was two 6' workstations with a shared printer, tape dispenser, air pillow machine between them. Maybe 4 employees packing, and 2-3 employees picking items and either bringing them up front or to the back. I think they had a handful of pallets that they stacked all the boxes on and left at the loading dock for UPS. New orders were coming in every 10 seconds or so, but they could have handled 10X that.

>Considering that technically they have one fulfillment center in every small town

Sorry to nitpick with an anecdote, but the closest Walmart to me is over 60 minutes away and I don't live in a small town, just one that rejects/blocks "big box" stores aggressively. Walmart certainly has a lot of stores but not everyone has one just around the corner (thankfully)

I know what you mean. Not every town can be like the one with maybe 3k inhabitants and 5 Rewe stores I know in Germany.

But still, 60 minutes means same day delivery without too much hazzle. An advantage Amazon doesn't have. Disadvantage is the considerably higher fix costs of Walmart and the like.

Dropshopping could, theoretically at least in my opinion, provide that geographic reach without adding additional fix costs for a player like Amazon.

EDIT: Typo

Agreed, and 60 minutes away the "Walmart every 20 min rule" applies. What's funny, is our region would welcome an Amazon "fulfillment" center because of the job creation, but Walmart is "evil".

To counter with an anecdote, I live in a metro area with over 4 million inhabitants, and the nearest Amazon fulfillment center is over 120 minutes away.

The bottom line is that Walmart's physical presence in the U.S. absolutely dwarfs that of Amazon... outside of NYC and a couple of mega-urban metropolises, who see Walmart as more "evil" than Amazon because they're in the mindset of still fighting the previous war.

The stat is that something like 90% of the U.S. population lives within a 15 min drive of a Walmart.

I guess that means I'm a 10%er! Neat.

Didn't yesterday's article about the packing robots mention Walmart had already done it?

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