Next-day shipping is old news. Now, it's all about hours — or minutes
Bloomberg/Getty Images Forget two-day delivery; major retailers are racing to get your orders out in hours or even minutes.
Walmart, Target, Kroger, and Home Depot have all recently stepped up deliveries in three hours or less.
US shoppers have shown they want their stuff now — and are willing to pay for it.
US shoppers want their stuff faster, and more retailers are responding with delivery options that would have been almost unthinkable a few years ago.
Comments this week from Target, Walmart, and Home Depot show that a new benchmark of three hours or less is emerging for customers willing to pay an express fee.
"The whole joke about doing five or six trips to the hardware store for every project, hopefully that can be a thing of the past," supply chain consultant Ralph Asher told Business Insider.
Asher was a pioneer of the concept of fulfilling e-commerce orders from stores back in 2018, when he worked in operations research for Target.
He did the math showing 75% of Americans lived within 10 miles of a Target store, which the company used in its decision to tap stores as e-commerce fulfillment hubs.
"That was something Target leveraged and leaned into pretty early on," he said.
Target says that number is now up to 80% of households, and that most of its same-day orders are completed within two to three hours.
The company said Wednesday that it continues to invest in delivery speed and saw 25% growth in same-day service compared to the same period last year.
Lowe's CEO Marvin Ellison also said Wednesday the home improvement chain's rollout of free and same-day delivery options earlier this year "really drove our online business" during the past quarter.
A day earlier, Home Depot said it would make the 3-hour option nationwide as an enhancement of its existing same-day service.
At Kroger, CFO David Kennerly said that deliveries completed in less than an hour accounted for half of the grocery chain's strong e-commerce growth in the quarter.
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