U.S: “Zipline Drone Delivery Expands to Texas Via Walmart”

The world’s largest drone deliv­ery com­pa­ny, Zipline, has expand­ed its Amer­i­can ser­vice to Texas, in part­ner­ship with super­mar­ket giant, Wal­mart, reports a press release.

After var­i­ous years of tri­alling and tin­ker­ing with logis­tics, Wal­mart has for­mal­ly launched the ser­vice in the Dal­las-Fort Worth (DFW) area.

The retail­er began the oper­a­tion on Wednes­day (April 8th) from its Super­centre at 200, US-80 in Mesquite, offer­ing free 30-minute deliv­ery to res­i­dents with­in an approx­i­mate two mile radius.

The release says, “This marks the first offi­cial launch of Zipline-pow­ered deliv­er­ies in the DFW metro­plex and sig­nals a new phase in Walmart’s mis­sion to bring fast, futur­is­tic con­ve­nience to doorsteps across Amer­i­ca.”

Jason Kel­ley, Walmart’s Mesquite store man­ag­er, com­ment­ed, “We are thrilled that our cus­tomers will now have access to this exclu­sive ser­vice. Zipline deliv­ery will offer fam­i­lies yet anoth­er way our store is help­ing them save mon­ey and live bet­ter.”

Since 2021, the retail­er has qui­et­ly been work­ing with Zipline to tri­al and deliv­er thou­sands of prod­ucts using its autonomous drone. But while much of that ear­ly work hap­pened out­side major metro areas, this launch brings the ser­vice to the urban core of North Texas and with it, a far big­ger spot­light.

Con­ner Wilkin­son, Head of Com­mu­ni­ty Engage­ment at Zipline, remarked, “We’ve already become part of people’s dai­ly rou­tines. Busy par­ents, old­er adults, any­one who doesn’t want to spend time run­ning errands, are lov­ing it.”

Zipline’s air­craft sys­tem, dubbed ‘Plat­form 2’, is inno­v­a­tive to say the least. Once a cus­tomer places an order, the items are loaded in to a Deliv­ery Zip. 

The drone lifts off to 300 ft, trav­els to the drop-off loca­tion and then, like some­thing out of a ‘Star Wars’ film, low­ers the pack­age via a ‘droid’ to the ground using a teth­er, while it hov­ers in place. The droid can even move on its own accord, when close to the ground, to achieve pin­point accu­ra­cy for the deliv­ery. Users have described the expe­ri­ence as qui­et, gen­tle and even mag­i­cal

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The Wal­mart launch comes after an ini­tial part­ner­ship with Drone­Up that result­ed in test flights at dozens of loca­tions. Yet, these fiz­zled out amid con­cerns over cost-effi­cien­cy. 

The Super­mar­ket end­ed the col­lab­o­ra­tion ear­li­er this year, shift­ing focus to more scal­able and eas­i­er oper­a­tions. Wel­come Zipline’s sys­tem, which has already racked up near­ly 1.5 mil­lion deliv­er­ies and over 100 mil­lion autonomous com­mer­cial miles glob­al­ly.

Wal­mart now has plans to reach up to 75 per­cent of the DFW area with drone deliv­ery, with the aim that dense­ly pop­u­lat­ed regions, com­bined with Zipline’s pre­ci­sion tech­nol­o­gy, will final­ly make on-demand sky ship­ping a thing of the present and not a future dream.

More than 65,000 items are avail­able through the ser­vice, includ­ing gro­cery sta­ples, last-minute din­ner ingre­di­ents, dia­pers and birth­day can­dles. Deliv­ery hours run from 10 am to 8 pm on week­days, and 8 am to 8 pm dur­ing week­ends.

To check eli­gi­bil­i­ty or to join the wait­list, cus­tomers can down­load the Zipline app or vis­it:- 

flyzipline.com/texas

The com­pa­ny is also host­ing a com­mu­ni­ty event on April 12th from 12pm to 3 pm at the Mesquite Wal­mart, where locals can learn more, ask ques­tions, and see the drones up close.

For more infor­ma­tion

https://www.flyzipline.com

(Images: Zipline)

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