Every fast delivery promise in American retail rests on a single measurement. It is the distance between your order and your doormat.
For two decades, Amazon (AMZN) closed that distance with scale. Enormous fulfillment centers, regionalized inventory, a cargo air fleet, and eventually a delivery van network of its own.
Walmart (WMT) closed it a different way. It was already there, with roughly 5,000 U.S. locations sitting inside a short drive of most American households.
Amazon’s version of the trick has been technological: denser inventory placement, more regional hubs, robotics that shave minutes off pick times. Walmart’s version was already built, paid for, and staffed.
That gap has shaped the last decade of e-commerce competition, and it explains why one retailer can hand you a rotisserie chicken in 90 minutes, while the other needs a regional hub to do it.
Amazon had spent the past year chipping away at the gap with a building type most shoppers have never heard of. Progress was steady and unspectacular.
This week, a leaked plan showed the company preparing to spend billions closing it. Within hours, one of Wall Street’s biggest Amazon bulls told clients what the money actually buys.
Why Walmart’s store count beats Amazon’s warehouse network
Walmart has never framed its stores as a liability. It has framed them as the last mile.
Its roughly 5,000 U.S. stores put fast delivery within 10 miles of 90% of the population, and the retailer has steadily converted them into local fulfillment centers, according to Business Insider.
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That proximity is the whole ballgame. Around 70% of Walmart’s e-commerce orders now arrive the same day, and more than 30% land in under three hours.
Amazon’s answer has been a smaller, newer building type called the Sub Same-Day fulfillment center. There are about 85 of them, and many sit up to a 90-minute drive from the customers they serve.
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Bank of America’s verdict on Amazon’s same-day delivery plan
Bank of America analyst Justin Post reiterated a buy rating and a $320 price objective on Amazon on Sept. 16, hours after internal documents described a tenfold expansion of that same-day network.
His read was blunt on the economics and bullish on the strategy. The $6.8 billion commitment is manageable against Amazon’s retail capital budget, which Bank of America (BAC) estimates near $50 billion a year, and a 2030 breakeven does not move profit estimates much.
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The strategic case is where Post put the weight. Amazon’s ability to compete on same-day delivery is “very important strategically,” he wrote in a note described by Business Insider, even if the direct financial impact stays modest.
That $320 target implies about 30% upside from Amazon’s $245.96 close on Sept. 16. Post values the company on a sum-of-the-parts basis, with Amazon Web Services (AWS) at nine times 2027 estimated sales and third-party retail at 2.5 times.
Inside the Project Mercury same-day delivery documents
The plan behind the note is codenamed Project Mercury, and the details come from internal Amazon planning documents first reported on Sept. 16 by Business Insider.
Amazon would take its Sub Same-Day footprint from roughly 85 sites to more than 1,000 by 2031, placing a facility within 10 miles of 80% of U.S. Prime subscribers, according to that reporting.
Each site stocks about 90,000 of Amazon’s fastest-moving items, the kind of order that rarely waits: paper towels, cough medicine, fresh groceries.
Key numbers from the Project Mercury documents
The figures below come from the internal documents reviewed by Business Insider, as summarized by PYMNTS on Sept. 16.
- Spending: $6.8 billion earmarked for U.S. same-day capacity across 2026 and 2027
- Return: An estimated $7.1 billion in economic value over 10 years
- Breakeven: Positive cash flow projected by 2030
- Volume: Same-day sites handling about 28% of Amazon-fulfilled units in 2029
- Format: A roughly 100,000-square-foot building processing about 75,000 units a day
The projections are preliminary and should not be read as final plans, an Amazon spokesperson said.
What the same-day buildout means for Amazon stock
In my analysis, the most useful thing about the Bank of America note is what it refuses to promise. A $6.8 billion commitment spread across years is close to a rounding error for this company, and Post says so plainly rather than dressing it up as a catalyst.
The strategic read is where I would spend attention. Walmart’s advantage was never something Amazon could out-engineer from a distance, and Project Mercury attacks it on the same terms: buildings, close to people, stocked with the goods households reorder every week.
For investors, the number to watch is not the 1,000 sites. It is whether denser placement lowers cost per package enough to hold the retail margin story together while Amazon pours capital into artificial intelligence (AI) infrastructure.
Wall Street is already positioned for that outcome, rating AMZN a strong buy with an average price target near $334, TipRanks data shows.
Amazon has not told sellers how products would qualify for these sites. Until it does, the plan reads as intent rather than commitment, and Bank of America is pricing it that way.
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