Walmart and Amazon are racing to speed up online order deliveries in rural areas of the U.S., a rich source of untapped sales that major retailers long wrote off as too sparsely inhabited, too remote or too impoverished to serve profitably. Walmart has a running start in the contest to build a loyal customer base in rural America. Roughly 90 per of U.S. residents live within 10 miles of a Walmart store, and 45 per cent of the company’s full-service Supercenters are in places with populations under 20,000, according to a report by investment bank Morgan Stanley.
Competition for the underserved market, which the bank's analysts estimated could be worth up to $1 trillion in annual sales, has intensified as remote workers swell the populations of small towns and communities on the far fringes of metropolitan areas.
