Lowe's Starts Flying Screwdrivers to Your Door in North Carolina
A pilot program with Wing and DoorDash lets Lowe's shoppers near Charlotte get small hardware items delivered by drone in as little as 20 minutes.
Lowe's has launched a drone delivery pilot in Matthews, North Carolina, a Charlotte suburb, in partnership with DoorDash and Alphabet's Wing. Customers in the pilot area can order through the DoorDash app and choose drone delivery for more than 100 SKUs, mostly small items like screwdrivers, painter's tape, and caulk. Wing's drones carry roughly 2.5 pounds per flight, and the company says deliveries can arrive in as fast as 20 minutes.
The pitch is aimed squarely at the specific pain point of a home improvement project stalling out because someone realizes mid-task that they are missing one small part. Rather than a second trip to the store, or waiting on a same-day delivery van, a drone can, in theory, clear that gap faster than a person could drive there and back. Lowe's is the first major home improvement retailer to test this delivery method, a small but real differentiator in a category where Home Depot and Lowe's otherwise compete mostly on price and inventory depth.
It is a single-market pilot for now, but the company has signaled the program could expand to additional stores if it works, and "if it works" here means proving that flying a screwdriver to someone's driveway is actually cheaper and faster than the alternatives, not just more interesting to write about.
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Kyle Duford, Founder & Editor, BRNDWIRE. More from Kyle →
