How Walmart and Alphabet jumped ahead of Amazon in drone delivery

Enlarge / A drone from Alphabet's Wing delivers a package to a customer. (credit: Wing)

Earlier this month, Google's sister company, Wing, began offering a drone delivery service in the Dallas suburbs of Frisco and Little Elm. Wing drones take off from nests" in two Walgreens parking lots to deliver things like health products or ice cream to nearby customers. Wing describes it as the first ever commercial drone delivery service in a major US metropolitan area."

One reason for that last caveat: Walmart has been running its own drone delivery service near its Bentonville, Arkansas, headquarters since November. Walmart delivers a range of products to customers within a 1.5-mile radius of two Walmart stores. The service will soon expand to a third Walmart store in the same corner of Arkansas.

Meanwhile, Amazon's drone efforts got some unflattering press coverage last week. Bloomberg reported on a drone crash at an Amazon test facility in Oregon. No one was injured, but the story underscores the fact that Amazon has yet to launch a commercial drone delivery service in the United States-despite a December 2013 segment on 60 Minutes where Jeff Bezos predicted drone deliveries might reach the market in four to five years.

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