Walmart has ~4500 (US) stores already. Aldi is expanding rapidly but has far fewer than that.
The two Aldi locations I drive past are both located less than a mile from the nearest Walmart locations (I expect they do a fair amount of piggybacking).
The purchase doesn't make a huge amount of sense to me. I guess the most sensible thing is that they see the stores being located by the best populations to start out doing food deliveries for (affluent, so they can charge higher prices while they figure out how to do it).
Walmart has a pickup service. They keep experimenting with rapid delivery but people don't really want to pay much for it.
After a few initial hiccups, my wife is sold on Walmart's grocery pickup service. For short-range delivery, they are also experimenting with "terrestrial drones"[1] which I have seen around town once or twice.
The premium of rapid delivery was a sticking point going back to the dot bomb era. A lot of people want rapid delivery (though admittedly only a subset want to order groceries online). But it's a premium service and a whole lot fewer want to pay for it.
The two Aldi locations I drive past are both located less than a mile from the nearest Walmart locations (I expect they do a fair amount of piggybacking).
The purchase doesn't make a huge amount of sense to me. I guess the most sensible thing is that they see the stores being located by the best populations to start out doing food deliveries for (affluent, so they can charge higher prices while they figure out how to do it).
Walmart has a pickup service. They keep experimenting with rapid delivery but people don't really want to pay much for it.