Walmart online grocery boom is stretching store workers thin

Walmart’s booming online grocery business is no longer a backroom side task. It is pushing the same store associates who stock shelves, answer customer questions and run the floor to also pick, stage and move pickup and delivery orders, turning every busy grocery department into a makeshift fulfillment hub.

That pressure starts with scale. Walmart said U.S. eCommerce sales contributed about 2.9% to comparable sales in fiscal 2025 and 2.6% in fiscal 2024, with growth driven mainly by store-fulfilled pickup and delivery. In February 2025, the company said it could reach 93% of U.S. households with same-day delivery, a number that shows how deeply online grocery has been woven into the chain’s store operations.

For workers, the shift means more lifting, tighter pacing and more friction between digital speed and in-store service. Associates in OPD and OGP feel it first, but the ripple reaches grocery, consumables and front-end teams when labor is pulled to stage orders, clear space or move merchandise fast enough to keep pickup slots on time. Department managers and assistant managers are left balancing customer flow on the sales floor against online metrics that now carry real weight.

Walmart’s own annual report also flags the tradeoff. The company says more online grocery sales could reduce store traffic and the extra purchases that come with it, which makes every pickup order a separate operational demand on a workforce that still has to keep the aisles full and the shoppers moving. Walmart supports more than 4,600 stores in its grocery network, so this is not happening in a few pilot markets. It is happening across the chain.

The store-as-fulfillment model has been building for years. Walmart launched Site-to-Store in 2007, said in 2019 that autonomous mobile carts were helping associates prep online grocery orders faster, and opened Alphabot in a Salem, New Hampshire supercenter in 2020 to speed pickup and delivery. The company’s 2025 materials say eCommerce growth was led again by store-fulfilled pickup, delivery and marketplace, underscoring how much of the digital business still depends on labor inside the four walls.

Walmart says the average U.S. hourly field associate makes $18.25 an hour. As online grocery keeps growing under Doug McMillon and John David Rainey, the key workplace question is whether staffing, tasking and safety can keep up with the pace now being demanded from the sales floor.