Walmart and Wing cut a ribbon in West Memphis, Arkansas, on Monday, November 2, with Mayor Marco McLendon, city officials and community leaders, and the city announced what it called the arrival of the Mid-South’s first drone delivery service. It is the first Arkansas city to claim a Wing and Walmart service, in the state where Walmart’s hometown is still missing from Wing’s map.
The city said standard delivery fees apply per order and that Walmart+ members get free drone delivery on eligible orders for a limited time. WREG pointed readers to wing.com to check whether their address qualifies.
Wing’s own site, checked November 6, lists 19 Walmart metros and none of them is in Arkansas. Memphis, the metro West Memphis belongs to, is still marked “Coming soon.”
Wing’s Map Still Shows Memphis as Coming Soon Days After the Ribbon
Wing’s Walmart page lists five metros as “Now serving”: Atlanta, Charlotte, Dallas-Fort Worth, Houston and Orlando. Memphis sits among the 14 marked “Coming soon,” and the page does not mention West Memphis, Arkansas or Tennessee. Wing’s Memphis page, as of November 6, offers a waitlist and nothing else.
The ribbon-cutting produced no announcement from either company. Wing’s newsroom has published nothing about Walmart since its Denver and Seattle release on October 5, and Walmart’s corporate newsroom has no West Memphis item. The only account is the city’s social media post, which WREG quoted on Monday, and which the station checked against the service itself: at about 3 p.m. that day, drone delivery was not available at West Memphis addresses.
The post’s own tense was future. “Soon, your Walmart orders will be delivered right to your doorstep by a DRONE!” the city wrote. It did not name the store, the launch date, the delivery radius or the number of aircraft. It did name Google’s $4 billion investment, the data center Google broke ground on in the city in October 2025, as the start of a run of technology wins. Wing began in Google’s X lab and is an Alphabet subsidiary, which the post did not say.
Walmart and Wing named Memphis among seven new metros in June, with delivery in as fast as 30 minutes, up to five pounds per order, and $19.99 per order for customers without Walmart+, per WMC’s June 10 report. That announcement listed no stores. The Monday post is the first time a specific city in the Memphis metro has claimed the service, and it sits on the Arkansas side of the river.
The Memphis-Side Stores Were Still in Planning Review in August
Walmart asked Memphis and Shelby County planners in August for fenced drone areas at two stores, 6727 Raleigh LaGrange Road and 577 North Germantown Parkway in Cordova. The Raleigh LaGrange enclosure would hold a kiosk, battery generator and nest for up to 18 aircraft, WREG reported on August 3.
Bartlett’s city leaders told WMC in June that Walmart planned to fly from the Supercenter at 8400 U.S. 64, and the Daily Memphian reported the same store on June 15 with no launch date. None of the three Tennessee stores has been reported approved or live since. June also put a second operator in the same metro. Amazon parked an MK-30 inside the Renasant Convention Center the following week for a meet-and-greet with no launch date, and Prime Air has announced nothing for Memphis since. As of Monday, neither company delivers a package in the Mid-South, and one of them has a ribbon.
DroneXL’s Take
A ribbon-cutting for a service that does not exist yet is a press event, and West Memphis got one. I don’t blame the city for taking it: a Google data center and a Google drone in the same year is a story a mayor wants to tell. But Walmart and Wing let a city declare the Mid-South’s first drone delivery service without saying a word themselves. The two of them have 14 metros marked “Coming soon” and have added names to that list faster than they have moved any to “Now serving” since Orlando in July, and on Thursday Walmart signed Zipline for 300 more sites while Wing’s list sat still. My read is that the store count on Walmart’s third-quarter earnings call this month will say more about the pace than any ribbon. The last verified number was 66 stores in four states, in May. If you live in West Memphis, the eligibility check at wing.com is the launch announcement. The ribbon isn’t.
Sources: WREG, November 2, WREG, August 3, WMC, June 10, Wing’s Walmart page, Wing’s Memphis page.
DroneXL uses automated tools to support research and source retrieval. All reporting and editorial perspectives are by Haye Kesteloo. Read our editorial standards.
