Walmart move into “uber uberized” delivery: the next disruption?

I came across an interesting article about Walmart’s recent acquisition of Joyrun assets. Rather than a typical delivery organization, Joyrun manages a community of people willing to make deliveries.

This got me thinking about the idea of uber uberization!! 

This is essentially leveraging people's spare capacity and time -like Airbnb or Blablacar - as the basis for a last mile delivery solutions. 

Using a community management aproach and marketplace is, in many respects, a lower cost and lower friction model. Established delivery services are constrained by labor laws and minimum wage requirements which can have implications on both cost and process. 

Where is the opportunity ? free spare capacity vs constraints to the existing last mile delivery solutions 

Let’s go back to the main type of players in the delivery market:

The biggest names have the biggest constraints: Ubereats/ Deliveroo/ Amazon/ UPS etc: have some critical challenges in common: mainly obligations to adhere to labor laws and to follow transported goods health constraints: ie manage up to four temperature variants (frozen, cold, ambient, warm).

These challenges in some way explain the continued existence and performance of sub scale or ad hoc teams delivering directly out of your local stores: in most cases they only need to adhere to labor laws, their health constraints (ie temperature) are significantly lighter.

This where the opportunity arises: Whenever we bring our own groceries home, we are mostly neither constrained by labor nor by health regulations. Same when we shop for our elderly etc. why then not for our neighbor etc if they are ok with this?

Some of the players in this market are in France and France could be a good market for them 

Names such as Yper, Shopopop, Courseur operate similar type of propositions.

Their French origin and operations could help them since France has seen the rise of BlaBlaCar the global leader of ride sharing, which in some way is simply about moving specific goods: people.