Walmart ups the ante for late-night delivery — again

Folks who get the late-night munchies have a new option.

Walmart is once again expanding its delivery services — this time until midnight with the launch of “Ultra Late-Night Delivery,” the retail giant said in an email to Chain Store Age. With the expansion, shoppers can now get deliveries from Walmart to their doors from 6:00 a.m. through 12:00 a.m. 

The midnight expansion follows comes on the heels of Walmart’s launch in March of “Early Morning Delivery,” which offers offers customers on-demand delivery earlier than ever: 6 a.m. The addition of the early morning hours followed Walmart’s fall 2023 decision to start offering its Express Delivery service until 10 p.m. on orders placed by 9:30 p.m.

With hundreds of thousands of items available in-store and online for express delivery, Walmart said it has everything customers need for those twilight hours and beyond, including late night snacks, pet supplies, and under-the-weather essentials ranging from medicine to chicken noodle soup.

“Life doesn’t always happen on schedule, and Walmart understands that implicitly,” said Tom Ward, executive VP and chief e-commerce officer, Walmart U.S., in the company’s announcement about the 10 p.m. delivery. “This is about more than just staying up late – it's about building a suite of pickup and delivery options that prioritize convenience, speed and putting the customer at the very center.”   

Walmart’s delivery operation — by the numbers

Walmart achieved a number of delivery milestones in its fiscal year 2023 (ended Jan. 31, 2023), including:

• Filling 3,165 miles of ocean containers in fiscal year 2023, or enough containers to span the U.S. from Los Angeles to Bangor, Maine.
• Making 248 million last-mile deliveries from 3,990 stores offering delivery.
• The Spark Delivery platform, which connects crowdsourced independent drivers with Walmart delivery opportunities, is the discounter’s largest local delivery service provider. Spark Delivery offers 84% U.S. household coverage and 15,000 pickup points, and saw 3x growth in drivers during fiscal year 2023.
• Walmart would have received ranking as a top 40 trucking firm during the fiscal year, based on backhaul revenue (cargo hauled on the return from a delivery) alone.
• Drivers making deliveries for Walmart drove more than 1 billion safe miles, or the equivalent of driving around the Earth 40,000 times, in fiscal year 2023. Thirty-seven drivers drove over 3 million safe miles each.