Walmart is doubling down on its in-home delivery service and plans to hire a fleet of 3,000 specially trained, body-cam-wearing drivers

• Walmart is expanding its InHome delivery program and seeking to hire 3,000 drivers.
• The program allows Walmart employees to enter shoppers' homes to make deliveries.

Walmart is seeking to hire 3,000 delivery drivers as it expands its InHome Delivery service. These body-camera-wearing, specially trained employees will be tasked with entering shoppers' homes to place groceries in the fridge and pick up Walmart.com returns.

"The goal's been around expanding the service now that we know we've got it really well tuned," Tom Ward, Walmart's senior vice president of last-mile delivery, told Insider.

Walmart InHome first launched in 2019, and initially focused on Kansas City, Pittsburgh, and Vero Beach, Florida. The service costs $19.95 a month, or $148 annually. In 2020, Walmart's then e-commerce CEO Marc Lore touted the offering as "the leading edge of something really big." Currently, the InHome program is available to around 6 million households through the retailer's app, although Walmart does not release information around how many consumers are subscribed to the program.

As part of this new expansion, the program will arrive in cities like Los Angeles, Chicago, Houston, Dallas, Nashville, and Indianapolis. The pool of potential customers is slated to grow to 30 million households by the end of 2022.

The company is seeking to hire over 3,000 delivery drivers, through external recruitment and internal promotion. Ward said that these employees are specially trained through traditional classroom sessions and virtual reality modules that go over each step of a potential delivery scenario. and required to wear masks and undergo pre-shift health checks.

With the supply chain industry still stuck in a labor crunch, Walmart is offering potential InHome delivery candidates $1.50 an hour more than most store roles, along with health benefits.

These employees will be fitted with wearable cameras, which are equipped to record the entire delivery.

"The app notifies the customer each step of the way," Ward said. "Customers can actually watch that for up to seven days after the delivery's been completed."

Ward said that InHome represents yet another option in Walmart's bid to provide convenient fulfillment choices, and that the service is bolstered by the chain's fleet of "4,700 stores located 10 miles from 90% of the US population."

"There's nothing more convenient than having the delivery driver actually put everything away while you're home," Ward said. "Especially in the working environment we're all in now."