Stephen Carroll

This is Bloomberg Tech.

Amazon spent decades perfecting urban and suburban delivery.

Now Amazon's expanding rapidly in rural America, duking it out with Walmart over the $1 trillion rural US market.

Bloomberg crunched exclusive data for this big take.

Bloomberg's Spencer Soper covers Amazon is behind it all.

Interesting battleground.

I mean, what's the Amazon strategy here?

Well, Amazon's always tried to sell to rural America.

And the proposition has always been, look, we'll connect you with a broad assortment of goods that it's going to be tough for you to find nearby.

But you're going to have to wait for them.

You know, Amazon's known for like one, two day delivery in most of the country.

But in rural areas, it could be four days, six days.

It's always been a bit longer.

And so the challenge there is how do we how do we speed that up?

Give a high cost.

Right.

It's so expensive to deliver to dispersed populations.

So they're trying to crack that and they're bringing in small business owners to deliver around their businesses for like two dollars and 50 cents a pop.

So that's really how they're trying to crack this code is by bringing in a new kind of partner other than the Postal Service or UPS that's willing to do these deliveries kind of like a side hustle.

Spencer, real quick, is the state of play that Walmart still dominates in rural areas?