Walmart and Amazon are racing to speed online order deliveries to rural America, a market both retailers once largely wrote off as too sparsely populated, too remote, or too poor to serve profitably. Remote work, rising rural incomes, and a retreat by traditional package carriers are rapidly rewriting the economics. The result is a multibillion-dollar investment push by the nation’s two largest retail companies, bringing same-day and next-day delivery into small towns and communities on the farthest fringes of metropolitan areas.
Walmart has a built-in head start. Roughly 90% of the U.S. population lives within 10 miles of a Walmart store, and 45% of its full-service Supercenters sit in places with fewer than 20,000 residents, according to investment bank Morgan Stanley. The bank estimates that the rural market for general merchandise—everything from electronics to home furnishings—accounts for about $1 trillion in annual sales, or 20% of all U.S. retail purchases excluding cars and gasoline.
Amazon is closing the gap with dollars and local logistics. The company last year invested $4 billion to bring same-day or next-day delivery to 4,000 smaller cities, towns, and rural communities, from Lewes, Delaware, to Padre Island, Texas. In a letter to shareholders last month, CEO Andy Jassy said the average monthly number of Amazon customers receiving same-day deliveries doubled in 2025 compared to a year earlier. “While other companies have been backing away from these customers, we’ve been running to them,” Jassy wrote.
The demographics are shifting in the retailers’ favor. Rural counties have shown steady growth in productivity and income over the past decade. The median household income in rural counties rose 43% between 2010 and 2022, hitting an all-time high of nearly $60,000 a year, consulting firm McKinsey reported. At the same time, the pandemic-driven rise of remote work has swelled exurban communities: the U.S. Census Bureau says places as far as 60 miles from a major downtown are among the fastest-growing in the country. Delivery drivers still face longer distances, sparse stops, and rough roads, but the customer base now has more income to spend and more expectation of speed.
Other retailers are moving to defend—or seize—a share of that growing demand. In January, Dollar General extended its same-day delivery service to more than 17,000 of its roughly 20,000 stores. CEO Todd Vasos told investment analysts in March that more than 80% of those orders arrive in an hour or less. Rural lifestyle chain Tractor Supply announced plans in January to add more than 150 delivery hubs this year, which will bring its total to 375 hubs covering more than half its stores and reaching over 15 million customers, enabling direct delivery of bulky items such as fence panels and riding lawnmowers.
Walmart and Amazon are taking distinct paths, each borrowing from the other’s strengths. Walmart—grounded in its vast network of physical stores—is outfitting Supercenters with robotic technology that picks and packs online orders from a storage area stocked with each location’s most popular items. Doug Sanders, Walmart’s senior director of e-commerce store fulfillment, said late last year that the automated system has allowed a Supercenter in Bentonville, Arkansas, to deliver groceries within a 30-mile radius, up from 10 miles only a few years ago. The company also credits a hexagonal mapping system, which replaced ZIP-code-based boundaries, with unlocking same-day delivery for 12 million more households. Instead of customers placing separate orders from multiple stores, drivers can now retrieve packages from more than one location in their service area.
Amazon, which began as an online bookseller and this year closed its Amazon Fresh and Amazon Go stores, is building small local delivery stations to shorten the distance between its massive fulfillment centers and rural doorsteps. The stations are placed based on drive time, customer demand, and delivery efficiency. Packages assembled at central warehouses are sent to these micro-hubs, where local gig workers and contractors pick them up for the final run. Holly Sullivan, Amazon’s vice president of worldwide economic development, said the goal is to cut the time from order to arrival by more than half—from as many as five days to under two days. A newly opened station in Roanoke, Virginia, illustrates the model: it delivers tens of thousands of packages daily across a radius that spans both the city and the surrounding rural communities, reaching customers roughly 90 minutes away by road, station manager Patrick Hamilton said.
The speed is winning over consumers like Dalton Klinger, operations manager of the Chamber of Commerce in St. George, Utah—a city of 100,000 set in the northeastern Mojave Desert. He said his Amazon orders of essentials such as canned tuna and jars of tomato sauce that once took four days now reach him in two. “People are wanting faster deliveries,” Klinger said. “It’s all about instant gratification.”
The rush by Walmart and Amazon comes as traditional carriers scale back. FedEx, UPS, and the U.S. Postal Service have reduced or slowed deliveries in some rural areas to concentrate on more profitable business or to trim expenses. The two retail giants are moving into that operational gap with their own fleets, micro-hubs, and, increasingly, delivery drones. Both companies are expanding drone programs to speed up shipments from stores and fulfillment centers, though the early deployments remain limited to specific corridors.