Walmart and Wing Add Seven Markets, Putting Two Drone Operators on a Collision Course in Memphis

Walmart and its drone partner Wing named seven new metro areas for their delivery network on June 10, and one of those cities should sound familiar to anyone who read DroneXL earlier today. Memphis is on the list. So is Phoenix. The Alphabet-owned operator will push the partnership toward nearly 20 US markets, and the new cities put Wing directly into airspace that Amazon is also courting.

The seven markets are Memphis, New Orleans, Philadelphia, Phoenix, San Diego, the San Francisco Bay Area, and Salt Lake City. A Youngstown station, WKBN, framed the news around Ohio, where Cincinnati is already in testing and the rollout extends the partners’ existing footprint. The Ohio angle is real, but it buries the sharper story. Two of the biggest names in drone delivery are now staging for the same handful of cities, and they are not bringing the same track record.

I have watched both programs up close, Wing’s tethered delivery drone and Amazon’s MK-30 at trade shows over the past year. They represent two different bets on what a delivery drone should be. Memphis is about to become the place where those bets get tested against each other in front of the same customers.

The Walmart and Wing Numbers Are Built on Volume Amazon Has Not Reached

Wing has completed well over one million commercial deliveries with Walmart, a figure that separates this partnership from every other US drone delivery effort. The average delivery runs 23 minutes. It is free for Walmart+ members and $19.99 for everyone else.

The expansion supports a plan the partners announced in January to build more than 270 locations and reach over 40 million Americans by 2027. The first phase of that plan began with a Houston buildout in January 2026. Heather Rivera, Wing’s chief business officer, said customers in existing markets already use the service multiple times per week, and that Wing is working with communities across the seven new markets now.

Wing leaned on its regulatory position in announcing the markets. The company pointed to its technology and what it called advanced FAA permissions, combined with Walmart’s retail footprint, as a logistics network unlike any other. Recent FAA approval for flights after sunset extended Wing’s operating window, and its drones lower packages by tether to a yard or driveway rather than descending to drop height.

Memphis Now Has Two Operators Staging at Once

Memphis is the clearest example of the convergence. Wing named it on June 10. One day earlier, Amazon parked an MK-30 inside the Renasant Convention Center for a community meet-and-greet, as DroneXL reported earlier. Neither operator has a launch date for the city. Both are running the early-stage playbook of community outreach and market staging at the same time. Amazon has repeated that sequence in market after market, from Baton Rouge to the Chicago suburbs, before flipping a city to active service.

The two services would not compete on identical terms. Amazon’s Prime Air charges $4.99 for Prime members and caps packages at five pounds within a 7.5-mile radius. Wing’s delivery is free for Walmart+ members, and its 23-minute average is a figure drawn from completed flights rather than a target. Amazon promises delivery in under an hour, though its principal acknowledged in a recent market briefing that the real current window is closer to two hours. One operator is a retailer using a specialized drone partner. The other is a retailer building its aircraft in-house. Memphis customers may get to choose between them, which is rare in a market segment where most cities have had access to neither.

Phoenix sits in the same position. Amazon has operated in the West Valley Phoenix area out of Tolleson since November 2024, and Wing’s new list adds Phoenix as well. The overlap is no longer theoretical. As DroneXL covered when Amazon targeted metro Atlanta, the company keeps moving into regions where Wing has already spent more than a year building store networks and customer habits.

The Safety Records Tell Different Stories

The gap that matters most is one neither press release mentioned. Wing has a million-plus deliveries behind it. Amazon’s MK-30 has a documented run of crashes into stationary objects that no other major operator has matched, and the contrast is the real subtext of two operators arriving in Memphis together.

Amazon suspended all US drone operations in January 2025 after two MK-30s crashed at its Pendleton, Oregon testing site. As DroneXL detailed in our Chicago coverage, the drones’ lidar sensors misread altitude in light rain and the software cut power to all six propellers mid-flight. Both aircraft were destroyed. After resuming in spring 2025, the MK-30 struck a construction crane in Tolleson, Arizona in October 2025, severed an internet cable in Waco, Texas that November, and flew into an apartment building in Richardson, Texas in February 2026, drawing FAA scrutiny each time.

None of those incidents caused reported injuries, and the damage has been limited to property. But cranes, cables, and walls are fixed objects. Amazon launched Kansas City just five days after the Richardson crash made national headlines, a pace that signals the company values momentum over optics. Wing, by contrast, is selling reliability and repeat use as its headline pitch, not aircraft hardware.

DroneXL’s Take

For years the story in drone delivery was whether it would arrive at all. The Walmart and Wing announcement, landing one day after Amazon’s Memphis event, marks a shift to a different question: which model wins on the ground in a city that suddenly has two. I have stood next to both aircraft at trade shows. Wing’s drone is small and purpose-built for a tether drop. Amazon’s MK-30 is an 83-pound machine carrying five pounds of cargo. Those design philosophies are about to meet the same customers in the same ZIP codes.

Here is what the announcements did not settle. Wing leads on volume with more than a million deliveries, but volume in Dallas-Fort Worth, Houston, and Atlanta does not automatically transfer to Memphis or Salt Lake City, where local zoning, weather, and customer habits all reset. Amazon has the deeper capital reserves and the willingness to absorb losses on every flight. Neither edge is decided yet, and pretending otherwise would be guessing.

Watch Memphis. Both operators have now staged there without a launch date, which makes it the first real head-to-head test of these two approaches in a single market. Whether Wing’s reliability pitch or Amazon’s spending power converts into actual customer preference is an open question, not a prediction. The answer will say more about the future of drone delivery than any single city announcement has so far.

Sources: WKBN, Wing.

DroneXL uses automated tools to support research and source retrieval. All reporting and editorial perspectives are by Haye Kesteloo.