If you’re an e-commerce giant that doesn’t offer some form of a free same-day delivery option, what are you even doing? Fast delivery is all the rage, thanks to Amazon always upping the ante. Now Target is trying to keep with the retail Joneses.
The big box store, known to many a suburban parent as “tar-zhay,” announced that it will offer same-day delivery for over 65,000 items—as long as customers pay $9.99. This is thanks to Target‘s $550 million acquisition of the startup Shipt in 2017. Members of Shipt get the same-day delivery free. (Before this acquisition, Target’s delivery and pickup options were shoddy at best—as we noted in a 2017 feature on the future of retail.)
This latest move follows a spate of delivery announcements. At its last earnings report, Amazon announced that it was investing heavily (read: $800 million) to roll out free one-day delivery. Then came Walmart, which announced shortly thereafter plans to implement free one-day shipping for 220,000 items. And now we have Target, which makes the retail trifecta complete.
Target has, in the past, offered same-day shipping, but it required a membership of either $99 a year or $14 a month. With this update, the retailer is doing its best to compete with the other big guys to make the service more widely available. We’ll see which company is the first to try its hand at free same-hour shipping.
A previous version of this article misstated how the same-day shipping deal would work. We regret the error.
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