Walmart has long argued that its 4,600 shops in the US represent a competitive advantage in e-commerce due to their proximity to customers’ homes, enabling delivery in less than three hours to 95% of the country. But picking groceries and merchandise inside a 180,000-square-foot Walmart Supercenter is time-consuming, and online order pickers in the aisles can get in the way of regular customers, who are more profitable. Walmart Depots are not open to the public. They are satellite shops of about 20,000 square feet (about 1,860 square metres) accessible only to on-call workers who use the Spark app for deliveries, to pick up orders and deliver them to customers.
The depots only stock popular household items and are supervised by the managers of neighbouring Supercenters. They have no sign outside and, from the description, resemble the dark stores of quick commerce.
Below: a dark store in Milan
