Walmart is Ditching ZIP Codes in Favor of Honeycomb-Style Maps As It Looks To Speed Up Deliveries

Walmart is taking a lesson from the humble honeybee in its quest to make its deliveries as fast as possible. From a report: The retail giant already boasts a formidable store count of 4,700 locations across the US, which puts it within a short drive of more than 90% of households. But in order to grow its reach without necessarily having to build new supercenters, Walmart says it has been using a relatively new hexagonal map segmentation -- a change from the conventional ZIP code or radius-based strategies that are commonly used in determining delivery areas.

Walmart says the strategy allows it to better understand where customers are and which stores have what they want. As bees have long known, hexagons can be an excellent shape for making the most of a given space, and Walmart says the more precise maps allow it to reach an additional 12 million US households with same-day delivery.

"This is helping us to adapt how we service our customers, by allowing us to go from a fixed-mile radius into a much more dynamic catchment area that caters to the needs of the customers that a particular store will serve," Walmart global tech senior director of engineering Parthibban Raja told Fast Company in December, following a pilot of the concept. Walmart says its platform uses a combination of its own data and open-source software to create new delivery zones.

Bestagons

[Tim the Gecko]

Honeybees and CGP Grey know it: Hexagons are the Bestagons [youtu.be].

Re:

[ffkom]

If Walmart wanted to minimize distance from on of their shops, they would use Voronoi cells [wikipedia.org], not Hexagons.

Modified honeycomb, I hope

[Baron_Yam]

Mapping and routing is horrendously complicated to do optimally (and you start by defining your criteria for 'optimal', which can be a job all its own).

You probably don't want the same honeycomb pattern over your entire map, but rather have multiple scales of honeycomb and local clusters that center on distribution centers. And then you allow for overlapping honeycombs (between multiple origin points and multiple scales, it's going to happen) and a point value system for determining which route should get priority under different circumstances.

Somehow, within those honeycombs, you also have to weight routes by speed and distance and things like low bridges, and decide how to weight those in your routing process and ensure you get your packages not only on a truck going in the right direction, but the right kind of truck for the route.

I could probably bring an arbitrarily large server farm to its knees trying to optimize routing for a large shipping company.

Re:

[Joe_Dragon]

walmart can just pass stuff like
TOLLS
PARKING FEES
on to subcontractors.

Also if in house in some citys it's cheaper to just pay parking tickets vs takeing the time to find an legal parking spot.

Re:Modified honeycomb, I hope

[Baron_Yam]

Cool story time... I used to deal with shipping TO Walmart.
  Utter fucking bastards, that's what they are.

Ensure all products are re-labeled to their standard instead of UPCs. Ensure all products are re-boxed according to their standard. Ship only on CHEP pallets (I sympathize with this one, actually, dealing with decaying pallets and skids isn't worth it).

Delivery? Well, any company you want, but they must arrive at a specific time and then wait upon Walmart's pleasure. Even if Walmart receiving has lined up 10x more trucks than they can process. If your delivery driver gives up and leaves, that's a missed delivery and a penalty... so when you ship you hope to God for a morning appointment and then further hope you won't have to pay the driver to sit outside their gates for the full day.

Then the inspection. If anything, and I mean ANYTHING isn't 100% correct, there's a good chance they'll turn back the whole shipment. And assess a penalty.

But hey, Walmart says they'll buy from you if you cut into your margins, and they'll buy 100x what you normally move, so it looks really, really attractive. Eventually you find you're sweating to death working for pennies and now your company is basically toast if you stop. THAT is when Walmart demands another cut in price, and if you can't do it, they just find someone else and you watch your company crash around you.

Yes. Walmart is an utter bastard to suppliers

[Anonymous Coward]

I know of two different suppliers where Walmart was returning stuff that was damaged in their stores - insisting on full credit. Returned after the season for that product was over, of course. One manufacturer expanded their business to supply Walmart's huge orders - and then went broke because of the unsalable junk that Walmart methodically collected from thousands of stores all over the country.

Re:

[alvinrod]

That's probably why Wal-Mart is one of the largest retailers on the planet and their largest competitor is regarded as an even more cutthroat version of them. They figured out that 95% of consumers just want an inexpensive product and don't particularly care much more beyond that. Maybe you think you're different, but if you found out that you could get something you need that's just as good as what you have now from your perspective, but for half the cost you'd switch too. It's why people dropped cable or

Re:

[aBlueMe]

With enough compute power Walmart could also just pre-calculate the cost of delivering to every address in the US.

To a certain extent you are just trying to screen out unprofitable customers. You want to put those unprofitable into a review bucket and not accept local delivery orders until you figure out a solution.

Re:

[PhrostyMcByte]

You're kinda describing a variation of the typical multi-level A* pathing system used for ages by games.

A* actually lends itself really well to adding extra weights (like traffic, hills, trucking limitations, etc.) and dimensions (coordinating a fleet), it's very flexible. I have no clue if A* is at all appropriate for mapping on a national level, but I can't think of why not.

TFA is somewhat vague but it appears that cinoared ti a square, the hexagons' more circular shape allow for a better 'fit' over natur

Honeycomb's big, yeah, yeah, yeah.

[Chris Mattern]

It's not small, no, no, no.

How much movement per hex?

[smooth wombat]

If they're sending a dragon to make a delivery, its movement rate is far better than a human, even a human on horseback. How are they calculating movement rates?

Re:

[ObliviousGnat]

Sometimes a human on a bicycle is faster than a jetliner. [archive.org] Is a dragon faster than that?

What 3 words?

[vanayr_pdm]

Sounds like all they did was spend a bunch of cash to recreate a project thatâ(TM)s already there.

Re:

[VaccinesCauseAdults]

Sounds like all they did was spend a bunch of cash ONCE, to avoid spending a bunch of cash EVERY YEAR on What3Words. What3Words costs around 1/3 cent per query on the largest volume rate publicly disclosed. https://accounts.what3words.co... [what3words.com]

Why not an arbitrary polygon?

[backslashdot]

Why not use area specific delivery time based polygon (which any graphics programmer knows is just a bunch of triangles)? Why restrict to hexagons?

Pop quiz

[50000BTU_barbecue]

What does the "cell" in "cell phone" refer to?