Amazon launched Prime in 2005 with a promise that felt almost absurd at the time: free two-day shipping on a million items, for a flat annual fee. It took nearly a decade for the rest of the retail industry to fully internalize the threat, and another decade to begin closing the gap. By 2025, two-day shipping wasn't a premium perk. It was the floor. The race that followed — to same-day, to a few hours, to under an hour, to under thirty minutes — has restructured the economics of last-mile logistics more dramatically than any single technology or policy shift in the industry's history. Here are the five US retailers who have committed most visibly and most consequentially to winning it.
Amazon
Amazon has delivered to Prime members at record speeds for three consecutive years. In 2025, that translated to over eight billion items arriving same or next day to US customers — a more than 30% increase over the prior year. Groceries and everyday essentials drove roughly half of that volume, a sign that the company has successfully expanded the fast-delivery use case far beyond its original electronics and media core.
The headline development of early 2026 was the rollout of one-hour and three-hour delivery across thousands of American cities. Three-hour delivery is now available in about 2,000 cities and towns, while one-hour delivery has been extended to hundreds of those areas, covering more than 90,000 products, including pantry staples, cleaning supplies, clothing, over-the-counter medications, and toys.
The infrastructure behind this is not a new network — Amazon built it by rearchitecting its existing Same-Day Delivery sites, allowing it to achieve dramatically faster speeds without constructing parallel logistics operations.
The deeper strategic shift underpinning all of this is inventory placement. Amazon's AI systems now predict where, when, and in what quantities specific products will be demanded — and pre-position stock in local fulfillment centers before customers order. The company's speed improvements come primarily from placing products closer to customers, not from accelerating the physical movement of packages once an order is placed. The result is that fast delivery has become an inventory management problem as much as a logistics problem. US Prime members saved an average of 64 trips to a physical store in 2025 — equating to over 55 hours saved, according to Amazon's own calculations.
Amazon is also piloting its Amazon Now service in the US — a sub-30-minute delivery option already live in India, Mexico, and the UAE — and has expanded same-day prescription delivery through Amazon Pharmacy. The prescription angle matters strategically: it signals that ultra-fast delivery is not merely a consumer convenience play, but an expanding infrastructure ambition that increasingly encroaches on industries — healthcare, grocery, personal care — that have historically been insulated from e-commerce disruption.
Walmart
Walmart's fast delivery story is fundamentally different from Amazon's, and that difference is its competitive moat. While Amazon built a network of dedicated fulfillment centers positioned for speed, Walmart's strategy is to turn its 4,700-plus US stores into the fulfillment network — a distributed last-mile infrastructure that Amazon would need hundreds of billions of dollars and years to replicate.
The results are starting to show at scale. Walmart's store-fulfilled delivery sales jumped nearly 50% last quarter, with about one-third of deliveries from stores arriving in three hours or less, and 20% of that portion arriving in 30 minutes or less. Put differently, Walmart is fulfilling roughly one in every fifteen store-based delivery orders in half an hour. That is a speed metric that would have been implausible from a retailer of Walmart's size just three years ago.
The enabling investments have been substantial and varied. Throughout 2025, Walmart bolstered drone delivery capabilities, leaned more on stores for same-day service, upgraded its geospatial technology to expand coverage range, and even piloted dark stores — locations that handle online orders but aren't open to the public — to streamline fulfillment for deliveries.
The drone expansion into metro markets like Atlanta represents a bet that aerial last-mile delivery is not science fiction but near-term competitive infrastructure. Walmart's roadmap is explicit: same-day delivery will become sub-same-day, with more items available at ultra-fast speeds in minutes.
The strategic significance extends beyond consumer convenience. The combination of Walmart's store-fulfilled model — where orders are picked, packed, and shipped from locations near customers — and premium fees for expedited service has helped Walmart achieve e-commerce profitability for the first time across both its US and global operations. Fast delivery, for Walmart, has become not just a defensive response to Amazon but the mechanism through which it achieved a business model milestone it had been pursuing for years.
Target
Target has been executing its fast delivery strategy with less fanfare than Amazon or Walmart, and with arguably the most efficient model of the three. Rather than building new infrastructure, Target has systematically converted its existing store network into a fulfillment operation — leveraging Shipt, the delivery subscription service it acquired in 2017, as the driver network and its stores as the pick-and-pack locations.
Same-day fulfillment is now Target's strongest digital growth catalyst. In Q3 fiscal 2025, digital comparable sales grew 2.4%, fueled by more than 35% growth in same-day delivery, powered by the Target Circle 360 membership program. Target now reaches 80% of US households with same-day services and 99% with two-day shipping. Those numbers represent a quiet operational achievement: a retailer with 1,900-plus stores has effectively built a same-day coverage map that rivals Amazon's, at a fraction of the capital cost, by treating every store as a local warehouse.
Target expanded next-day delivery to the top 35 US metropolitan areas in late 2025 — reaching 54% of the US population, up from 20% — with plans to add more than 20 additional metro areas in 2026. The logistics architecture is shifting from a national fulfillment model to what Target's chief supply chain officer described as a "market-based approach" — matching fulfillment resources to local demand patterns, shifting high-volume digital orders to stores with the backroom capacity to handle them efficiently rather than routing everything through centralized distribution.
Best Buy
Best Buy's fast delivery strategy is distinctive in the category because electronics purchases are not impulse buys in the way that grocery or household essentials are. A customer ordering a 65-inch television or a new laptop doesn't necessarily need it in 30 minutes — but they do want it on a specific schedule, with reliable timing, and often with professional installation or setup services that pure e-commerce competitors cannot easily match. That insight is the foundation of Best Buy's speed play.
Best Buy achieved its fastest shipping fulfillment speeds ever and delivered its highest on-time rate in Q3 fiscal 2026. The company also expanded 2-hour delivery window scheduling to all US markets — giving customers the ability to select a precise two-hour window for delivery rather than committing to a full-day wait. That precision matters more for big-ticket electronics than raw speed. A customer can plan their day around a confirmed two-hour window in a way they cannot around a vague "delivery today" promise.
The broader Best Buy thesis is that electronics retail in the fast-delivery era requires a combination of speed, expertise, and service that logistics-only players cannot replicate. The Geek Squad in-home service network, paired with same-day and two-hour delivery scheduling, is designed to serve a customer need that Amazon — for all its speed — cannot fully address without an army of trained technicians. Best Buy is betting that the intersection of fast delivery and expert setup is a defensible position in a market where the pure speed race is nearly impossible for a specialty retailer to win.
Old Navy's entry into ultra-fast delivery is perhaps the most instructive case study on this list — not because of its scale, but because of what it reveals about where the fast delivery trend is heading beyond the obvious big-box incumbents. Apparel has historically been one of the last categories assumed to require same-day delivery. Customers plan ahead for clothing purchases, or so the assumption went. Old Navy's partnership with DoorDash, announced in early 2026, is a direct challenge to that assumption.
The model is straightforward: Old Navy's retail stores, already geographically distributed near residential populations, serve as fulfillment nodes for same-day delivery orders placed online. DoorDash — a platform with hundreds of thousands of active drivers and existing last-mile infrastructure built around the density of urban and suburban residential delivery — handles the final mile. For Old Navy, the marginal cost of this arrangement is relatively low: the store network already exists, the inventory is already in the stores, and DoorDash's driver network eliminates the need to build proprietary delivery infrastructure.
The strategic implication for the broader retail market is significant. If a mid-sized apparel brand can credibly offer same-day delivery by piggybacking on existing gig-economy delivery networks, the capital barrier to fast delivery has effectively collapsed for any retailer with a physical store presence.
What Amazon and Walmart have spent billions building from scratch, a brand like Old Navy can now approximate — for a subset of categories and markets — through a platform partnership. The question for the industry is whether "approximate" is good enough to change customer behavior, or whether the operational reliability gap between a purpose-built logistics network and a DoorDash driver picking up a sweater still matters to the consumer.