Walmart and Amazon are making a coordinated push to win over rural customers with faster delivery options, according to an Associated Press report that described the competitive effort as the latest front in a drive for online shoppers. The companies are betting that rural parts of the country offer “untapped sales” even though retailers for years considered those areas too sparsely inhabited, too remote or too impoverished to serve profitably, the report said.
The competition is also intensifying as deliveries become harder for other carriers in some rural locations. The report said FedEx, UPS and the U.S. Postal Service are scaling back or slowing deliveries to some rural areas to cut costs or focus on more profitable businesses—an environment that can make quick retail shipping more valuable to customers who do not have many alternatives.
Walmart has been building an early advantage in rural markets, the report said, citing a Morgan Stanley analysis that estimated about 90% of U.S. residents live within 10 miles of a Walmart store. It also said Morgan Stanley estimated 45% of Walmart’s full-service Supercenters are in places with populations under 20,000.
Morgan Stanley’s view of the opportunity extends beyond access: the report said analysts estimated rural competition could be worth up to $1 trillion in annual sales. It pointed to changing demographics as part of why those communities are becoming more attractive, including population growth in small towns tied to remote work and exurban migration.
The AP report attributed some of the market shift to rural economic gains over the past decade, citing a McKinsey analysis. It said rural counties showed “steady growth in productivity and income,” with median household income rising 43% between 2010 and 2022 to nearly $60,000 a year, according to McKinsey, and with the U.S. Census Bureau reporting that since the pandemic, some communities located as far as 60 miles from a major city’s downtown have been among the fastest-growing places in the U.S.
Both companies are also using fulfillment and routing technology designed to reduce delays created by the logistics realities of rural delivery. The report said rural areas can mean longer distances between stops and sometimes narrow or unpaved roads, which increases per-package labor and fuel costs and adds time to the delivery journey.
As Amazon expands, it has put investments into rapid delivery infrastructure, the report said. It cited that Amazon last year invested $4 billion to bring same-day or next-day deliveries to 4,000 smaller cities, towns and rural communities. The report also described Amazon’s approach as combining technology intended to forecast demand and the opening of “small micro hubs” in rural areas.
In a letter to shareholders reported by the AP, Amazon CEO Andy Jassy said “the average monthly number of Amazon customers receiving same-day deliveries doubled in 2025 compared to the year before.” Jassy wrote that Amazon has been using artificial intelligence-based tools to forecast demand while opening those small micro hubs, and the report highlighted his statement that “we’ve been running to them” after describing that other companies were backing away from rural customers.
The report also detailed how Walmart and Amazon are pursuing different operational methods that reflect their roots in traditional retail and e-commerce. For Walmart, it said the company is equipping stores with robotic technology that picks and packs online orders from inventory positioned for each location. It cited a Walmart executive describing how automated retrieval helped a Bentonville, Arkansas, Supercenter deliver groceries within a 30-mile radius—up from 10 miles just a few years earlier—and said Walmart credited an approach using hexagonal mapping for making same-day deliveries available to 12 million more households.
For Amazon, the report said the company is building local infrastructure to shorten the distance between warehouses and rural communities. It described Amazon setting up small delivery stations that serve nearby groups of communities based on drive time, customer demand and delivery efficiency, with packages assembled at large fulfillment centers sent to hubs for sorting before local gig workers and contractors deliver them.
The push for speed is also spreading beyond the two biggest companies, the report said, with other retailers pursuing delivery expansion designed to keep customers from switching to competitors. It said Dollar General extended same-day delivery to more than 17,000 of its stores in January and that Tractor Supply planned to add more than 150 delivery hubs this year, bringing the total to 375 hubs to cover more than half its stores and reach over 15 million customers.
At the end of the report’s examples, the AP described how faster service can change shopping expectations in rural settings. It quoted Dalton Klinger, operations manager for the St. George, Utah, Chamber of Commerce, saying his Amazon orders of essentials such as canned tuna and jars of tomato sauce that once took four days now arrive in two, and the report included his view that “People are wanting faster deliveries,” adding that “It’s all about instant gratification.”