New Fulfillment Center Draws Walmart Closer to Guaranteed Two-Day Deliveries
With a sharp eye on Amazon, this retail titan is expanding its digital delivery footprint.
Walmart’s digital future may lie in McCordsville, Ind. with the opening of a massive fulfillment center in the Indiana town.
The center is a huge building block for Walmart as it looks to speed up package deliveries to consumers. Deliveries are increasingly becoming the shopping selection of choice for millions of Americans, as more than 263 million Americans – about 80% of the population – now shop online, according to FitSmallBusiness.
DON’T MISS: Walmart Stock Has Been On Fire
Walmart is actively courting delivery-minded with its new 2.2 million-square-foot fulfillment center in McCordsville, located about 20 miles northeast of Indianapolis.
The McCordsville site is the largest fulfillment center Walmart has ever built, and it's the second of four large fulfillment centers to be built in the next three years.
The fulfillment centers are designed with technology in mind, leveraging robotics, machine learning, and advanced data analytics to boost the retailer’s next-day or two-day product delivery experiences.
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The aim with all four centers, plus Walmart’s 31 e-commerce fulfillment centers and 4,700 physical stores is to ensure that next-day and second-day orders will be available to 95% of the U.S. population within the next three years.
“The McCordsville grand opening marks a major milestone in our supply chain modernization journey,” said Karisa Sprague, senior vice president, fulfillment network operations for Walmart U.S. “With more customers shopping online, we’re leveraging state-of-the-art technology to increase the speed of delivery all while creating tech empowered career opportunities for our associates.”
Walmart’s new technology-driven fulfillment centers enable workers to package and ship products within 30 minutes of customers placing the order. The fulfillment center will create 1,000 jobs, many of them in technology posts that will play a big role in the company’s fulfillment center initiatives.
Walmart stock is trading at $155 per share and is up 9.7% on a year-to-date basis.
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