A fleet of drones is taking flight across the greater Houston region today, as Walmart launches its first drone delivery service in the city.
The retail behemoth is partnering with Wing, a drone delivery company owned by Google’s parent company Alphabet, to let customers in the Houston region to order groceries and household essentials from five area Walmart stores in as little as 30 minutes.
The partnership between the companies first launched in 2022, when Walmart sent Wing drones flying from several stores in the Dallas area. Houston marks the first new market for the drone delivery service in 2026, and the companies plan to be coast-to-coast by the end of this year, with Wing drones flying from Walmart stores in cities including Miami and Los Angeles.
Heather Rivera, Wing’s chief business officer, said in an interview that the advantages of drone delivery are straightforward.
“It’s an incredibly convenient and very, very fast way to get what you need, when you need it,” she said.
In addition to that, she continued, drones don’t have to deal with Houston traffic.
Wing’s drones will “nest” at five Walmart supercenters in the region—two in Katy, one in Crosby, one in Kemah and one in northwest Houston, where a ribbon-cutting was held Thursday morning.
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“At the end of the day, what we’re doing is we’re saving customers time,” she said. “I think that there’s ways for all of these services to really work really well together.”
Many of Wing’s customers to date, she continued, have never ordered small items for delivery via drone before. But the company’s service has proven popular in its first markets; on the eve of the Houston launch, Wing had completed about 750,000 deliveries with its various partners.
“What we’ve generally found is that once a consumer places their first order, they come back and they place another one,” Rivera said.
If you say so. I can believe the saving time part of this, given the location of the WalMarts involved in the drone delivery. The WalMart on Yale near I-10 is a five-minute drive from my house. I’m quite certain I could get whatever I needed from WalMart, on the rare occasion I do need something from WalMart, and be back home with it in less than the 30-minute minimum for drone delivery nearly all of the time. I doubt that would be true for anyone who shops at one of the supercenter locations. This was from January, it’s been in the drafts for awhile, but now that this is a thing, has anyone used it? Seen it? I can’t say that I have.
As with our flying taxi future, I’m sure there will be a high-profile failure of the technology at some point. As noxious as Houston traffic can be, falling objects are usually not one of the hazards to avoid. That’s not necessarily the case anymore. WalMart has made use of other autonomous delivery services in the past, I wonder if this is an expansion of that or a replacement for it. At least one assumes there are humans at the back end of this, loading the goodies onto the drones. For now, anyway. The Dallas Observer has some tips on protecting your privacy from these drones, and TechCrunch has more.