Evan Schuman's StorefrontBacktalk

It’s not even just pizza anymore. Many cities now have restaurant-delivery services. On Wednesday (Oct. 31) Burger King announced it is extending its Washington, D.C., delivery trial to Miami. Target delivery time: 45 minutes. Typical delivery charge: $1 to $2. That’s a long way from what Amazon, Walmart and Google are offering.

It appears ebay is the only same-day experimenter that currently understands this idea, claiming it will complete deliveries within an hour for $5. We don’t know whether that’s actually happening, but suppose it is. Then ebay only has one problem: Nobody in retail believes ebay can actually afford to deliver items from other chain’s stores inside an hour for $5. Walmart, for example, is running deliveries out of its own stores and requires a four-hour lead time and a four-hour delivery window—and still charges $10.

Why? Probably because ebay really can’t make money at this. It would have to launch a whole new business to turn a profit, in any case. That means the stakes are low, and ebay can afford to burn through its budget for the trial. (Google is in much the same position—if anything, it has even less skin in the retail game than ebay.)

On the other hand, Walmart (like other brick-and-mortar chains) has a huge opportunity in same-day—make that same-hour—delivery that leverages the advantage of all that existing, expensive real estate. It’s an advantage that Amazon can’t beat—Walmart’s stores are literally so much closer to most customers than Amazon’s DCs that Amazon can’t possibly win that race.

Maybe that’s what’s making Walmart hesitant to push its own delivery trial as hard as it pushes its suppliers. The stakes are high, and that’s making Walmart skittish.

The irony is that, at its core, this is about logistics and integration. It’s 90 percent IT, and Walmart has already solved 90 percent of the problems. Walmart has systems to optimize how to make deliveries. It knows how to track inventory and fill orders. It has site-to-store in place. In principle, the chain just needs to tack on quick delivery, guided by tweaked logistics beamed to a smartphone in the delivery guy’s car.

In practice, it’ll be harder. And Walmart has never been in the pizza business, so on-demand same-hour delivery may sound impossible. Being just slightly more convenient than Amazon, and only a little more expensive, sounds a lot more appealing.

But every chain that has ever gone up against Amazon should know that being only slightly better won’t work. And every chain that has tried to force customers to change their expectations should know that’s also a losing game. (Ask JCPenney about coupons or any chain about contactless cards.)

It’s easy to rationalize that customers won’t mind waiting hours for a long delivery window to roll around—after all, same-day is still a lot better than next-day, right? Except after more than three years, hardly anyone even remembered Amazon’s “order by 10:00 AM and we’ll deliver by 8:00 PM” same-day program until the Financial Times rediscovered it this summer. Hardly sounds like a customer favorite, does it?

Yes, customers will mind waiting, especially once they make the comparison to food delivery. And yes, chains—especially Walmart—can probably figure out how to make this work so it’s about as fast and cheap for customers to pay for same-hour delivery as it is to drive to the store.

But not until they wake up and smell the pizza.