You Want That Gift to Arrive Today? This Is What It Takes.

Retailers like Amazon, Walmart and Target have figured out that if they get you your online order today, you will probably spend more tomorrow.

One day in early November, I ordered an emotional support pickle. The image on Amazon showed a green crocheted prolate vegetable, with a pink bow fixed on top and two black button eyes. It held a sign that read, “Emotional Support Pickle: I will always be around to let you know that you are a BIG DILL.”

I wanted it right away. And my wish seemed attainable.

In the past year, if you’ve shopped online from one of the big retailers, you’ve probably noticed new delivery options. You do not have to wait two days or even overnight for your package to arrive. Instead, you can get what you want that very afternoon, between 4 and 8 p.m., if you’d like.

For $6.99, I could get a little emotional support during the busy holiday shopping season, which, for a reporter covering the retail industry, is also the busy season. More important, I wanted to understand how it was possible to order a gag gift in the morning and have it arrive before I went to sleep.

Retailers, which have long competed on price or quality, are now in an all-out race for same-day deliveries. Why? Few people truly need the service; if you are desperate for diapers or a special pasta-making attachment, you’ll go to the store. But companies have found that, once acquired, the taste for speedy delivery makes customers both loyal and willing to spend more money.

“Customers love fast delivery, and the faster we deliver, the more often customers come back,” said Sarah Mathew, a vice president for delivery experience at Amazon. “It doesn’t sound like rocket science, but that was really the aha of ‘Oh, we should really continue to invest here.’”

Amazon set the standard for speed. For years, Amazon’s Prime membership, which now costs $139 a year, came with two-day shipping. Then in April 2019, it announced that next-day delivery would be the new normal. Almost immediately, sales growth picked up steam.

Retailers like Walmart joined the race, and found they had an advantage: physical stores close to doorsteps. Walmart, which last year started offering customers deliveries in as little as 30 minutes, says it can now offer same-day delivery to 86 percent of all U.S. households from its 4,600 stores. In November, Walmart’s chief financial officer said deliveries from stores were up nearly 50 percent from a year earlier and accounted for $2.5 billion in sales in each of the previous 12 consecutive months. Sales on delivered items grew faster than sales in stores.

Target also uses the merchandise in its stores to get same-day orders to customers’ homes. And average shipping times for all orders are nearly a day faster than they were a year ago, Target’s chief operating officer said last month, helped by sortation centers, which rely on products from its stores and Shipt, a delivery service it purchased in 2017.

Amazon doesn’t have thousands of stores near shoppers. So it has tried other techniques. The company introduced drone delivery that could get packages to customers in Texas and Arizona within an hour. There were limits: The item had to be under five pounds. Standing kitchen mixer emergency? Forget it.

In 2023, the company redesigned its U.S. fulfillment network, breaking its nationwide system into eight regions. That meant more products would be closer to more customers, making deliveries faster and cheaper because they had to cover less distance.

The company also shaved time by opening same-day facilities, which combine a warehouse and a delivery depot into one structure. There are more than 55 of these facilities.

With the holiday shopping season in full swing, that speed will be put to the test. On Cyber Monday, consumers spent $13.3 billion, a 7.3 percent increase from last year.

To see Amazon’s same-day delivery “on steroids,” as Ms. Mathew put it, I toured one of the company’s newest same-day facilities.

I also saw where the company’s ambitions to deliver your desires at superhero speed hit some bumps, depending on where you live. The company has same-day delivery to 120 metro areas and is building same-day facilities “where the demand is,” Ms. Mathew said. But even within high-demand areas, the system has snafus.

I found this out trying to get my nonedible pickle delivered to my apartment in Brooklyn. “Unbeknownst to you,” said Marc Wulfraat, an industry consultant who closely tracks Amazon’s facilities, “you stumbled upon a complicated complex.”

Or, as Zac Rogers, a professor of operations and supply chain management at Colorado State University, told me, Amazon’s same-day delivery “works sort of through a combination basically of elegant innovation and brute force scale.”

A New York-Chicago Challenge

Around 11 a.m. on Nov. 7, I tried to order my emotional support pickle. The page responded with a cheery “Thank you for loving same-day delivery this much!” before giving me the bad news: All the same-day delivery offers had been claimed for the day. I should come back tomorrow.

Instead of getting a pickle, I was in one. I vowed to try again.

The next morning, I logged on before 7, surely early enough to grab a slot before everything had been spoken for. But I received the same message. I started changing delivery addresses to see if that would make a difference, eventually hitting the mark with a friend’s building about a mile away. I could get my pickle on the same day if I sent it her way. I had to wait for her to wake up, and then there was some back and forth to explain why I urgently needed this item. By then, the same-day slots for her house had disappeared.

Soon after, however, my dad called. My parents live in Chicago, but we share an Amazon Prime account, and he wanted to know why I was changing the addresses. (Monitoring his accounts is one of the many ways my retired father fills his days, I guess.) Curious, he asked to get in on the action. The mission to figure out same-day delivery was now a national one.

He purchased his support pickle around 9 a.m. Following the pickle’s progress on the Amazon app on his phone, he saw it go out for delivery before 10. At 12:33, three and a half hours after he made his order, he texted me: The pickle had arrived.

When I ordered the pickle the next morning at 8, Amazon told me that it would arrive at my friend’s house between 5 and 10 p.m. It traveled from a fulfillment center in Robbinsville, N.J., and it arrived within that window at 7:30, almost 12 hours later.

I texted my dad the update. “That area is a different beast,” he responded.

He was correct. My parents live a short drive from one of Amazon’s same-day facilities. I do not.

Pods and Cubbies Along the Happy Path

In New York City, there is one Amazon same-day center: a 218,000-square-foot warehouse in the Bronx that sits on the lot of a former multiplex cinema and has been operating for a year. The combined warehouse and delivery depot sends same-day orders to customers in the Bronx and nearby Queens, but not to Manhattan, Brooklyn or Staten Island.

Other fulfillment centers can accommodate same-day deliveries by adding a dedicated group that handles those orders — which is how the pickle reached my friend’s house — but they are not set up in quite the same way. One way to move things faster is by limiting the options. Amazon’s large fulfillment centers can store up to 40 million products, but same-day centers like the one in the Bronx keep on hand just the 100,000 top-selling items for that area.

“This is their version of a Walmart store,” Mr. Wulfraat, the consultant, said.

On a recent Tuesday morning, Pratik Shah, a 28-year-old site manager, led me on a tour of the Bronx center. He showed me the “happy path” that my emotional support pickle would have taken had I lived in the right borough. It takes an average of five hours from the time a customer clicks the buy button to when the item arrives at the door, Mr. Shah said.

The available merchandise is determined by what millions of customers are searching for and purchasing frequently. In the Bronx, that includes “everyday essentials” like Gatorade, garbage bags, cat litter and adhesive hooks, as well as electronics like frequently misplaced iPhone chargers and air tags to find them the next time.

As Halloween approaches, more costumes are moved to same-day delivery. The same goes for toys as Christmas nears.

“It’s not necessarily going to be what you want,” said Matthew Hockenberry, a historian of supply chains at Fordham University. “It’s what you are willing to accept.”

When a customer places a same-day order and it is routed to the Bronx center, things start happening quickly. Smaller items that can be grabbed by hand are stored on tall yellow robots called “pods.” These previously packed pods navigate to workers’ stations. Think of those pods as shelves in a store. (Larger items are held in another part of the warehouse.)

While I watched, a screen directed Keri Simon, a fulfillment center associate, to grab particular items off the pod — a bottle of shampoo or a 2025 New Yorker calendar — and place them in a gray cubbyhole.

On the other side of the cubbyholes, Isabel Isais packed the items into one of three different sleeves: two sizes of brown paper and one plastic option. The computer in front showed which packaging to choose. Using these sleeves is faster than loading up boxes. Then a machine spit out a shipping label, which Ms. Isais put on the package.

All of this took seconds.

From there, my emotional support pickle would have been placed on a conveyor belt that carried it around the plant until it reached a machine that stamped a yellow sticker indicating its delivery route on the wrapped package. Amazon uses what it calls “routing technology” to account for the type of delivery locations, the size and weight of the package, walking distance and getting in and out of the vehicle.

On its final leg in the warehouse, the package falls down a designated chute where workers place packages in a cart. The carts, which hold up to 75 packages, are rolled to a pickup area. Delivery drivers then pull their assigned cart into the parking lot for one of the four daily deliveries: “breakfast,” “brunch,” “lunch” or “dinner” — the meal you may be eating when your package arrives.

Making Nice With the Doorman

One of the biggest issues in delivery is the “last-mile” problem — getting an object from a warehouse to your doorstep. This step adds costs, and the logistics can be hairy. And in cities like New York, a profusion of delivery vehicles block narrow streets and create traffic jams.

In the parking lot of Amazon’s center in the Bronx, there are no Amazon delivery trucks, just a lot of Nissans and Toyotas. The delivery drivers wear blue Amazon vests, but they drive their own cars, loading up their trunks and back seats with goods.

Amazon classifies drivers who handle Amazon’s same-day deliveries — called Amazon Flex — as independent contractors. But the drivers sued Amazon in 2016, saying they were being misclassified; that proposed class action is still being litigated.

For the time being, Amazon limits its same-day orders in New York City because of traffic and other issues, said Brian Perez, who leads Amazon’s same-day operations in several Northeastern states. Delivering in the city creates special headaches, particularly in Manhattan, where drivers and e-bike delivery people can be foiled by incorrect passcodes or mislabeled apartment numbers.

Mr. Perez said he had a team that worked “with the lobby management” to build Amazon lockers or “cater our delivery times around each of the apartment building constraints.”

They make friendly with the doorman, essentially.

Before I left the Bronx same-day center, I wanted to know if there had ever been an item that made Mr. Perez scratch his head and wonder, “Does that person really need that today?”

After some coaxing, he offered an answer.

“I mean, a PlayStation controller comes to mind,” Mr. Perez said. “Did you really need that same day?”

But, in truth, he didn’t judge. Some people are avid gamers. Some need their Gatorade electrolyte boost. Some have a yen for an emotional support pickle.

“To each his own, right?” he said. It was his job, along with the robots, the pickers, the packers, the scanners and the drivers, to get them there.

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