https://www.reuters.com/article/us-retail-walmart-delivery/e...

If anyone is delivering something to your home, they know where you live.

Option A: You drive to Walmart, pick up your shopping and three other people's, you drive home via three other homes.

Option B: A driver starts at Walmart, picks up four people's shopping including yours, delivers it all, and returns to Walmart.

Seems to me the number of person-hours and distance driven is identical in both cases?

Option B would likely be an employee requiring additional taxes to be paid and benefits to be supplied.

This is not a comprehensive argument.

So option B is really, "A driver starts at Walmart, picks up three people's shopping, delivers it all, returns to Walmart. You also drive to Walmart, pick up your shopping, and drive home."

There's still the entry barrier of having a background check, verifying insurance, etc., so it'd likely be more effort than it's worth for neighborhood Joe to sign up for it unless he wanted this as a full-fledged side hustle. If people want to do a "community delivery"-style thing, they can just sign-up for DoorDash/Postmates/IC/etc.

what happens when I make the delivery, but someone gets injured in the process? DoorDash has insurance for this most likely.

Shipt supposedly covers it–their contractor agreement states that you need to have the state required auto insurance and they have a policy that takes effect while working that will increase your coverage to commercial-level insurance. I have also asked their insurance department about this directly and this has been confirmed.

It’s so much better to either piggyback on the mail or just have customers do curbside.