Remember when people used to complain that they’d been promised flying cars but never got them?
It was a common gripe about the future—that for all the technological progress, humans were still stuck driving on the ground like chumps, their jetpack dreams deferred indefinitely.
Well, I have news. The flying vehicles are here; they’re just unmanned. Last month, Walmart made it official.
The company announced it’s launching drone delivery from six stores in metro Atlanta, part of a broader rollout that will eventually cover Houston, Charlotte, Tampa, and Orlando.
If you haven’t seen it yet, here’s how it works, powered by Wing (a subsidiary of Alphabet, Google’s parent company):
A customer places an order through an app, and a Walmart worker grabs the items (weighing a few pounds at most) and loads them onto a drone in a fenced-off area of the parking lot.
The drone takes off, carrying the order on a tether, and flies up to six miles away at speeds up to 65 miles per hour. When it arrives, it hovers about 150 feet above the ground, lowers the package on the tether, releases it, and heads back to Walmart.
Total time: as little as 10 minutes.
Popular items so far include things like fresh fruit, eggs, ice cream, pet food, over-the-counter medicine, and small rotisserie chickens.
The context: war
If you follow drone news at all, much of what we’ve heard recently has to do with military applications, spurred by expanding defense budgets and the experience of how the battlefield has developed after the Russian invasion of Ukraine.
Ukraine has more than 300 drone makers now. The Pentagon is awarding contracts to Ukrainian startups. Western governments are negotiating deals to get access to Ukrainian drone technology.
But then there’s Walmart, quietly building the mundane, peaceful version of the same technology.
The economics still need work. A 2023 McKinsey study estimated that each drone delivery costs $13.50 on average. Walmart is clearly in this for the learning curve and the head start as much as the immediate profitability.
Also: If you happen to live in the kind of place that has banned gas-powered leaf blowers over the noise, I wonder what it will be like when drone traffic reaches critical mass and the sound becomes part of our daily lives.
That said, Walmart now has drones operating at over 100 stores, which works out to about 2 percent of its 4,606 locations. But they’re gathering data, refining the system, and expanding steadily.
The last-mile problem
Companies have spent decades trying to solve what they call the “last mile problem.”
From a logistics perspective, it’s relatively easy to get goods from factory to warehouse to distribution center. The real challenge is delivering to individual homes—navigating traffic, finding parking, dealing with dogs and doorbells and people who aren’t home.
Drones sidestep all of that. They don’t care about stop signs or pedestrians or traffic jams. They fly straight to your backyard, drop the package, and leave.
It’s hard to look at what’s happening and not see this as a big part of the eventual solution.
So yes, there are flying vehicles now. They’re not the sleek personal jetpacks people once imagined. They’re not the sci-fi cars from The Jetsons.
They’re utilitarian quadcopters carrying your emergency ice cream order while you binge-watch Netflix on a Sunday night. And they’re also being used as weapons of war.
That’s the future: simultaneously more mundane and more dystopian than anyone predicted.
But it’s here. Just a bit different than what was once imagined.
A few other things worth knowing about …
The U.S. Senate unanimously passed legislation Tuesday that would allow victims to sue over nonconsensual, sexually explicit AI-generated images in response to a widening uproar over a flood of graphic content on billionaire Elon Musk’s X platform. It still has to pass the House and get President Trump to sign it. (Bloomberg)
‘Shoot to Kill’: Accounts of Brutal Crackdown Emerge From Iran: As many as 3,000 feared dead as witnesses describe government forces firing on unarmed protesters. (The New York Times)
Top federal prosecutors in Minnesota and Washington resigned en masse over the government’s push to investigate the widow of a woman killed by an ICE agent, while not investigating the shooter. Among those who left: a top federal attorney in Minneapolis who oversaw the sprawling fraud investigation that sparked the Trump administration’s immigration crackdown in Minnesota to begin with. (The New York Times)
President Trump was caught on video twice mouthing “F--k you!” and making an expletive obscene gesture toward a heckler who had called him a “pedophile protector” during a visit to a Ford factory, a moment the White House later defended as an “appropriate and unambiguous response.” TJ Sabula, a 40-year-old United Auto Workers Local 600 line worker, told The Washington Post that he was the one shouting at Trump, and that he has now been suspended from work. “As far as calling him out, definitely no regrets whatsoever,” Sabula said. (Fox News, The Washington Post)
The Supreme Court on Tuesday appeared likely to uphold bans on transgender athletes taking part in girls’ and women’s school and college sports. A provision of Title IX that specifically allows for sex-classifications in sports makes it clear that “sports are different,” said conservative Justice Neil Gorsuch. (NBC News)
New findings from the American Cancer Society show that more Americans diagnosed with cancer are now surviving the disease — marking a positive trend that experts say reflects the effectiveness of early prevention and detection strategies, and advancements in treatment and care. The most notable survival gains occurring among people diagnosed with more fatal cancers such as myeloma (a blood cancer), liver cancer and lung cancer.
Scott Adams, the controversial cartoonist who skewered corporate culture, has died at age 68, He announced in May 2025 that he had metastatic prostate cancer and only months to live. Adams rose to fame in the early 1990s with his comic strip Dilbert, satirizing white-collar culture based on his own experiences working in company offices. He made headlines again in the final years of his life for controversial comments about race, gender and other topics, which led to Dilbert’s widespread cancellation in 2023. (NPR)
Wireless phone chargers are now common in vehicles, but they’re typically missing one very useful feature. Nissan announced last month that it will be the first automaker in the US to offer wireless chargers with a magnetic mount, ensuring charging coils remain aligned for faster charging of mobile devices, even while a vehicle is in motion. (The Verge)
Thanks for reading. Photo by Brett Jordan on Unsplash. I wrote about some of this before at Inc.com. See you in the comments.
Who/what will manage traffic control? Is the assumption just that it will happen automatically? What happens if/when collisions happen? If/when they become inevitable??
I have lots of questions....
I can’t think of anything more scary right this minute than drones of any kind flying around over our heads. How can a deadly one be discerned from a more benign one? I’m convinced that humans are so canny, we will engineer our own extinction. And we have the temerity to call other animals dumb.