Employee Parcel Delivery: idle labor became last-mile capacity

The problem

In March 2020, Best Buy stores closed to browsing and online orders surged. Every one of those packages went out through a carrier. At the same time, Geek Squad agents, the employees who install and repair products inside customers' homes, lost most of their work. Customers didn't want visitors, and stay-at-home orders restricted in-home service. The default move was to send trained people home.

What I saw

The people and the packages were already near the customer.

Before the pandemic, I had written a whitepaper on employee parcel delivery, backed by ship-from-store volume by store, labor cost per employee, vehicle expense per mile and other operating data. Employees already worked near customers every day, and stores already held packages headed to those customers. For a short final trip, an employee could carry a package to the door for less than a carrier charged.

What I built

I brought the whitepaper to leadership in March 2020, and the pilot went live in April, three weeks later. It shipped that fast because it added one role to the workforce platform my team had already built in Flex work: schedule the role, not the person.

• One new role, not a new organization: any employee certified to drive a Best Buy vehicle who had earned the parcel delivery role could do the work, regardless of job code.
• No carton, no postage: an employee parcel needed only an address label and a scan.
• The app did the routing: the employee app scanned each package and built the optimal route using Google's routing APIs.
• Shifts in the app employees already used: an associate who wanted more hours could pick up a delivery shift.

The result

• In August 2020, Best Buy's CEO said store employees were making same-day deliveries to customers' homes from 200 stores, and its COO said this was "a lower cost than using a third-party service."
• In November 2020, she said an associate who wanted more hours could grab an extra shift making deliveries to customers' homes.
• In December 2020, Best Buy said it had employees "in almost all of our stores to deliver online orders right to customers' doors," until 10:30 p.m. local time every day.
• In February 2021, Best Buy reported that its employees had delivered more than 1 million units.
• In May 2021, Best Buy's CEO said employee delivery reached "about two times the penetration" of the prior quarter, mostly supporting next-day orders, and that customers told Best Buy they weren't expecting "a blue shirt necessarily to come walking up with the package."

What I learned

Write the idea down before you need it. The three-week launch was possible because the thinking was already done.