Not Tomorrow, Not Even an Hour — Now Goods Arrive in Minutes

American shoppers want their purchases faster and faster, and major retailers are responding with delivery options that would have seemed unthinkable just a few years ago. According to statements from Target, Walmart, and Home Depot this week, delivery within three hours or less — for an extra fee — is becoming the new standard.

The roots of this shift in delivery speed trace back to 2018, when supply chain consultant Ralph Asher, then working in Target's operations research department, calculated that 75% of Americans live within 10 miles of a Target store — a finding that became the basis for the company's decision to turn its stores into online order fulfillment hubs. Today that figure has reached 80%, and Target says most of its same-day orders are now completed within two to three hours — a 25% increase from the same period last year.

Home Depot announced it's rolling out three-hour delivery nationwide. Lowe's CEO Marvin Ellison said free and same-day delivery, introduced earlier this year, boosted the company's online sales "significantly." At Kroger, CFO David Kennerley said orders delivered in under an hour accounted for half of the grocery chain's online sales growth.

According to Asher, two key factors are increasingly enabling retailers to offer fast delivery: store location and order density. "It all comes down to route density," he says. "If you can complete 10 deliveries on one route in an hour, the driver's hourly cost gets split across ten orders instead of two or three." Walmart has repeatedly highlighted this dynamic in past earnings calls: delivering to more households lets the company achieve both lower costs and higher speed. Last quarter, 37% of Walmart's store-fulfilled delivery orders were completed in under three hours.

And finally — drones. While FedEx pioneered reliable overnight delivery back in the 1970s, it was Amazon that turned e-commerce into a daily habit for Americans. Now the company has announced it will expand its drone delivery service to nearly 500 U.S. cities and counties by the end of this year — with orders arriving in an average of 60 minutes after checkout, and sometimes as fast as 30.

Still, not every shopper needs that kind of speed. Amazon customer Lindsey Osten, whose video of an order landing via drone in her backyard pool went viral on social media, says she wasn't expecting her order — cat food and shoe insoles — to arrive in 20 minutes: "If I need something in 20 minutes, I'd rather just get in my car and go get it myself. Same-day or 24-hour delivery is a different story — that's plenty fast enough."