The news: Walmart will begin offering 30-minute delivery from in-store Subway restaurants through its Express Delivery service this month. Customers can order a sandwich on its own or bundle it with a Walmart order from select stores across six states—Connecticut, Florida, Georgia, Ohio, Pennsylvania, and Texas. Walmart plans to expand the service to about 1,400 locations by the end of summer.

The strategy: Walmart is layering restaurant delivery onto its existing store and logistics network to increase order frequency and drive engagement in its app.

• Orders flow through Walmart.com and the Walmart app at standard menu prices.
• Though launching with Subway, its largest in-store restaurant partner, Walmart is exploring adding nearby eateries to broaden the offering.

The challenge: Walmart is entering a crowded market where consumer habits are deeply entrenched and subscription programs reinforce loyalty. Some 12% of US adults pay for DoorDash’s DashPass and 8% for Uber One, per our survey with Bizrate Insights. Those memberships bundle delivery perks that keep users within a single ecosystem.

Implications for retailers: It’s easy to see why Walmart views adding restaurant delivery as a low-cost way to boost order frequency and extract more value from existing logistics. The bigger question is whether consumers will adopt the service.

Without a broader selection of restaurants, there is limited incentive for users to switch from platforms they already use and pay for. And without stronger differentiation—such as bundling free or discounted delivery into Walmart+—the offering risks competing on convenience alone, which is difficult in a market already defined by speed and scale.

Unless Walmart can quickly expand selection or more tightly integrate the service into its membership ecosystem, it risks running into the same challenges Amazon faced when it launched Amazon Restaurants in 2015. Despite heavy investment, Amazon ultimately failed to carve out a distinct niche against DoorDash, Grubhub, and Uber Eats, shutting the service down after four years and later opting to bundle Grubhub+ into Prime instead of competing directly.