Walmart and Wing intend to expand drone delivery service to an additional 150 stores over the coming year, with plans to reach more than 270 locations in 2027. According to a January 11 release from Wing, Walmart's newest drone service areas in 2026 will include Los Angeles, St. Louis, Cincinnati and Miami, with other cities expected to be announced later in the year.
The big-box retailer also plans to launch drone deliveries in the Houston metropolitan area on January 15 and previously announced plans to serve Tampa, Orlando, Atlanta and Charlotte by June 2026. "Drone delivery plays an important role in our ability to deliver what customers want, exactly when they want it," said Walmart senior VP Greg Cathey. "By expanding drone delivery to new major metro areas, we are helping more customers solve for their last-minute needs faster than ever before."
Wing's delivery drones can carry up to five pounds at a time, travel at speeds of up to 60 miles per hour and have a roundtrip range of 12 miles. Eligible items are typically limited to smaller groceries and household items such as over-the-counter medicines, eggs and fresh produce. From a supply chain perspective, this narrow-corridor, low-tonnage but high-frequency delivery model is reshaping in-store micro-fulfillment design and shelf-level safety stock calculations.
Scaling drone delivery to as many as 270 locations also implies faster integration of FAA-regulated Beyond Visual Line of Sight (BVLOS) permissions into operational infrastructure. From a supply chain perspective, the parallel scale ambitions of competitors such as Amazon Prime Air and Zipline increasingly call into question the long-term economic superiority of conventional courier-based last-mile models. UPS, FedEx and USPS will need to keep drone partnerships firmly on their roadmaps in order to defend their B2C last-mile share.
