Wing
Baby wipes and eggs.
Those are two of the top products Wing CEO Adam Woodworth says Walmart shoppers commonly order using his company’s drone delivery service.
“The baby wipes one makes total sense to me,” he told Business Insider. “It’s a problem when you run out.”
The reason for eggs’ popularity was less obvious to him until he realized customers were most likely testing the technology’s handling.
“If you can get eggs delivered and they show up and they’re not cracked, you can get pretty much anything delivered,” Woodworth said.
Millions more households will soon be able to try drone delivery, as Walmart and Wing announce their largest expansion yet.
The companies said Thursday that they are bringing the service to 100 more US stores across metro areas, including Atlanta, Charlotte, Houston, Orlando, and Tampa. They’re also expanding in the Dallas-Fort Worth market, where the tech has been live for the past year and a half.
Woodworth said drone delivery is proving popular in the areas where it is widely available. Thousands of customers are turning to the service each week to purchase everyday items like groceries or household supplies.
“You’re cooking dinner and you realize that the recipe called for scallions and you forgot to get them at the store,” he said. (Walmart CEO Doug McMillon previously said he used the service to order last-minute cooking wine for dinner without leaving the couch.)
Wing’s drones have a payload of five pounds, which means they can carry about half of the 120,000 items typically found at a Walmart Supercenter. In other words, not a gallon of milk, which weighs eight pounds, but a quart to get you through the morning rush.
Wing said the average delivery time is under 19 minutes. Woodworth said the company wants to get that down to 15.
“Something where it would be way faster to get it delivered than to jump in your car and go drive to the store,” he said.
(For the parents waiting on baby wipes, that’s about two episodes of “Bluey.”)
Americans have harbored their suspicions about delivery drones zipping around overhead (some have even shot at them, which is a felony). Woodworth said Wing does demos to get communities more comfortable with the idea.
“The immediate reaction is that negative one,” he said. “But over time, the questions go from the negative to ‘Okay, well, when is it going to come to my house?'”
The post The CEO of Walmart’s drone partner says shoppers are ordering eggs to test the technology’s handling appeared first on Business Insider.
