Walmart has announced a subscription service they’re calling Walmart+ for $100 a year that gives members unlimited free shipping from Walmart.com, free same day shipping from Walmart stores, and 5 cents off per gallon on gas at their stations (Sams Club – a Walmart subsidiary – gas stations not yet included but the company says they will be soon). That’s basically it for now. You can also skip lines in Walmart stores and pay with your Walmart+ account and just walk out the door or something.
The name is boring, adding another Plus branded subscription service to the AppleTV+, Disney+, but – Is it worth it?
You may have noticed by that list that the perks are as generic as the service name. Despite the analyst headlines and overwhelming consensus that this is “Walmarts answer to Amazon Prime”, this is clearly not designed to compete with Amazon Prime like the media hot takes are claiming. More on that in a minute.
The major missing feature is video… Amazon Prime includes movie and tv show streaming in its service along with a bunch of other perks like free cloud storage for photos that most users don’t take advantage of and Walmart isn’t offering anything like that at launch. They could have as the company used to own video streaming streaming service Vudu that offered free and paid streaming rentals and sold it for some reason to Comcast’s Fandango who wanted it for who-knows-why (Fandango already has a streaming service that does the exact same thing Vudu does and its parent company Comcast owns NBCUniversal which already streams its own content on its apps and the newly debuted Peacock streaming service but they wanted one more streamer). Making the lack of video in Walmart+ and Walmarts sale of Vudu even stranger is that at the same time all this is going on, Walmart also wants to co-parent Tik Tok with Microsoft as the phone based short video making/watching app looks for a buyer.
So for whatever reason, Walmart isn’t trying to compete with, er, their biggest competitor, Amazon, who debuted Prime 15 years ago. This is a defensive move to retain customers within their Walmart ecosystem to help dissuade more people from defecting to Amazon for their shopping needs, not an offensive move (at least not yet) to compete with Amazon users who already buy most of their delivered goods through Amazon.
BUT – the one thing that would make Walmart+ worth the hundy a year is the same day free delivery from local stores. That one is a winner because many Walmart stores are also grocery stores so that means unlimited free same day delivery on groceries without having to tip a deliverer (I’m assuming) and without marked up prices like grocery delivery services such as Instacart instates on all the items they make available with their partners.
Walmart+ launches September 15 so will be looking into it more but at this point I’m thinking it’s a probable buy for that reason.