How to divide America (but in a good way!)

Hexagons over squares and circles, here's why.

Imagine that you wanted to divide the United States into segments that were exactly the same size, without overlapping or missing any part of the map. What shape should the segments be?

It sounds like a tricky interview question that big companies might ask top job candidates. In fact, it comes to us today because the biggest employer in America, Walmart, used the answer to launch a new idea that just might give it a big advantage over other retailers—and inspire your business, too.

The shape we’re looking for here is the hexagon: a six-sided polygon with the near-unique characteristic of being able to fit alongside other similarly shaped sections, so that each edge lines up perfectly, covering an entire surface without gaps.

Of course, that leads us to the next question: Why would Walmart want to divide big parts of the U.S. into hexagons in the first place?

There are several reasons, according to a Walmart statement, and when you add them together they should combine to offer better delivery service and a competitive advantage.

• First, dividing the country into hexagons instead of using the default segment — zip codes—means that customers who live near each other will have much more uniform delivery availability: “A household that might have previously been just beyond the delivery boundary now can enjoy the same convenient service as their neighbors across the street.”

• Also, using smaller hexagons means a lot more data behind the scenes on what’s available to customers located within each segment. This is especially useful when a customer orders multiple items that are in stock at one Walmart but not another.

• Finally, and closest to the bottom line, Walmart says that dividing geographic areas into hexagons ultimately means it can expand the number of U.S. households that can get same-day delivery of products from Walmart by 12 million. (Walmart says it’s now able to provide same-day delivery to 93% of U.S. households.)

The edge-to-edge fitting property of the hexagon is interesting.

There are two other shapes that can also cover an entire area without gaps or overlap—squares and equilateral triangles—but the advantage of a hexagon is that the length of the edges are smaller.

(Hat tip on that point to Philip Ball, writing in the science journal Nautilus, as found by Alex Vuocolo at Retail Brew. It’s also what explains why honeybees build their hives using perfect hexagons.)

And, it’s also intriguing to note that on a personal level, I may have benefited from the kind of data science behind this whole idea at Walmart. Let’s just say that if you ever have to order an inexpensive air mattress and pump for delivery late at night in rural Arizona when you’re on vacation with your extended family, you might try checking out Walmart’s same-day delivery.

But, the real takeaway might be how Walmart has stacked together one innovation or benefit after another in its effort to build a convenient delivery business to take on its rival: Amazon’s Prime.

I suspect this might go down as one of the most consequential retail battles in U.S. history, if it works in the end.

It really comes down to the story of how Walmart flipped its “dinosaur” business model, with nearly 5,000 brick-and-mortar stores, and turned them into a competitive advantage against Prime—which had started 15 years earlier.

As John Furner, CEO of Walmart U.S., said in March: “I am very, very grateful that we have 4,700, roughly, stores,” since each one can also double as a delivery fulfillment center.

But, big strategy isn’t enough: Execution requires innovative thinking and technology. The hexagons involve both.

Seriously, how many times have you come up with an idea, only to have others tell you that it’s already been done, or that someone else has such a big head start that you could never catch up?

Fortunately, there’s a big difference between things that are impossible and things that are merely difficult and challenging.

Next time you’re trying to tell them apart, remember the hexagon—and the lesson that a simple insight might make all the difference.

---

7 other things worth knowing today

• Today is Memorial Day. I wrote here five years ago about the three soldiers I always think of who gave their lives for the USA. (Understandably)

• A federal judge blocked the Trump administration from cutting off Harvard’s enrollment of foreign students, an action the Ivy League school decried as unconstitutional retaliation for defying the White House’s political demands. (AP)

• The Trump administration is planning to dispatch hundreds of border agents to different parts of the country so they can help Immigration and Customs Enforcement arrest unauthorized immigrants in the U.S interior. The effort is expected to involve around 500 personnel, including green-uniformed Border Patrol agents. Historically, CBP's work has been mainly limited to the Mexican and Canadian borders, maritime sectors and international airports. (CBS News)

• I'm sure this will be perfectly safe in the end: Anthropic said its latest artificial intelligence model resorted to blackmail when told it would be taken offline. In a safety test, the AI company asked Claude Opus 4 to act as an assistant to a fictional company, but then gave it access to (also fictional) emails saying that (a) it would be replaced, and (b) the engineer behind the decision was cheating on his wife. Anthropic said the model “[threatened] to reveal the affair” if the replacement went ahead. (Semafor)

• Fireworks are coming early to the summer box office, thanks to the combo of Disney’s live-action redo of Lilo & Stitch and Tom Cruise’s final Mission: Impossible movie from Paramount and Skydance. The two tentpoles are expected to fuel the biggest Memorial Day of all time in terms of ticket sales and set numerous records in their own right. (Hollywood Reporter)

• The surprising benefits of going to bed angry at your partner. (CNN)

• A group of at least 18 Army Rangers apparently went rogue when they opened fire at a crowded Florida beach last Friday and sent boaters and sunbathers ducking for cover. Army Rangers take part in the annual Billy Bowlegs Pirate Festival at the nearby Fort Walton Beach each year, but federal officials said note the Rangers in the videos were not participating in a sanctioned event at the time - and were located outside of the festival's perimeter. (Daily Mail)

---

Thanks for reading. Photo by Sam Balye on Unsplash. I wrote about some of this before at Inc.com. See you in the comments.