Lowe's starts drone delivery with Wing and DoorDash: one store, 2.5-pound loads, a 5-mile radius

Lowe's has started delivering by drone through a partnership with DoorDash and Alphabet's Wing, CNBC first reported on Thursday. In its own release, Lowe's called itself the first home improvement retailer to offer drone delivery, with orders arriving in as little as 20 minutes. Customers order through the DoorDash app, where drone delivery appears as an option for eligible addresses.

Lowe's shares were down 0.6% at $190.18 in early trading, according to Nasdaq, a move in line with a weak open for the broader market.

What the pilot actually is

The headline says Lowe's is launching a drone service. The details are narrower, and that is normal for a test:

• One store. The pilot runs from the Lowe's in Matthews, N.C., near Charlotte, where Wing and DoorDash already fly deliveries for other brands. Lowe's operates more than 1,750 stores, according to the release.
• About 2.5 pounds per flight and a 5-mile radius from the store, according to CNBC.
• Just over 100 products, per CNBC. The release lists hand tools, paint products, tape, soap, cleaner and batteries.

Seemantini Godbole, Lowe's chief information and AI officer, told CNBC the company is still testing and may expand beyond the Matthews store if it works. Neither Lowe's nor its partners gave a timeline, a delivery fee or a cost per drop.

Who it is for

Lowe's pitched the service at both do-it-yourselfers and its Pro customers, the trade buyers who work on jobsites. The use case it describes is the job that stalls because someone is missing one small item. For a contractor, that errand has a real cost: a crew member off the jobsite for the round trip to the store.

A 2.5-pound limit rules out most of what a contractor hauls, such as lumber, drywall, bags of concrete and fixtures. What is left is the small stuff: a pack of blades, a roll of tape, a set of batteries, a brush. That is where the idea could pay off, but only for jobs inside the five-mile circle.

CheckThisBiz, a directory of 7.7 million independent US businesses with chains and franchises excluded, lists 141,913 independent construction and contractor businesses, led by Texas (12,896), California (12,642) and Florida (11,414). North Carolina has 5,133 of them.

The Matthews test reaches only a small slice of those, so the pilot will say more about whether drone delivery works for a home improvement chain than about how contractors buy supplies.

Lowe's joins Amazon, Walmart and Uber Eats, which already deliver by drone, according to CNBC. The report also noted noise and privacy objections to drones in some states, and that busier airspace requires regulatory approval.

Sources: Lowe's; CNBC; Nasdaq; CheckThisBiz business counts. This is market information, not investment advice.