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Like a fresh-faced college grad, Alphabet’s drone delivery arm Wing is making its first foray into big-city life. The company announced Wednesday that it will partner with Walgreens to begin making deliveries in two parts of the of the Dallas-Fort Worth area.
In recent years, drone delivery services have made meaningful strides, delivering vaccines in Ghana, Samsung phones in Ireland, and foodstuffs in Fayetteville, North Carolina. But most of these deliveries have happened in areas that are much less populous than Dallas-Fort Worth, the fourth-largest metro area in the US with ~7.6 million residents.
- It also marks the first time Wing will allow a third-party (in this case, Walgreens) to load up the drones with packages.
For now, the service is only available in Frisco and Little Elm, both located on the northern border of the DFW metro. But the company says it plans to scale up a commercial service in Dallas in the coming months.
Zoom out: Wing crossed the 100,000 delivery mark earlier this year, with most of the action happening in Australia. It also increased its deliveries by 500% in 2020, Wing’s head of go-to-market Alexa Dennett told us in March.
Impressive milestones no doubt, but a reminder of where drone delivery stands overall: Amazon delivered about 11.5 million packages every single day in 2020. So, it’s early, early innings.