Wing finds a drone delivery home in Vicinity shopping centres

Wing is a drone delivery service that has been operating in controlled test conditions in a couple of parts of Australia for a little while now. It seems they are here to stay, with a partnership with Vicinity shopping centres that could see a drone delivery service starting up near you.

We’ve seen this first hand, operating down in regional NSW outside Canberra, two years ago we were sent this video of a Wing drone delivery on a suburban driveway.

Another similar trial has been taking place in Logan Queensland, and since Mid-August this year over 2500 deliveries have been made from a new “Wing Nest” atop a Vicinity Shopping centre.

The Grand Plaza shopping centre now has an installation on it’s roof that’s far more high tech than many rooftops around the world – It’s a landing platform for sixteen autonomous delivery drones.

Wing is an Alphabet Company (Google), leading the world in drone delivery, with everything from small items from a pharmacy to your Boost Juice able to be delivered by drone.

Vicinity’s Chief Innovation and Information Officer, Justin Mills says “Research by Vicinity’s Data Science and Insights team and Quantium shows 71% of Australian retailers have adopted an omnichannel approach, and physical retail is critical to that success, driving an uplift in online market share of up to 40% from customers who live nearby,”

“The drone delivery service will help our retailers drive incremental sales, leveraging the value of their physical store
and attracting new customers to engage with the centre. It also helps solve delivery-based pain points identified in
our customer research.

“Our partnership with Wing is a natural extension of our distribution and fulfilment strategy which will help retailers
use physical stores and our shopping centre network to get their products into customer hands quicker and more
efficiently.”

In some ways this seems like a gimmick, but in reality, 66% of Aussies live within 30 minutes of one of 61 Vicinity Shopping centres, so this could well be coming to a shopping centre near you.

Wing Australia Head of Policy and Community Affairs, Jesse Suskin said, “We’re delighted to explore this new model
of delivery with Vicinity. For the first time, we are co-locating our drones with businesses at their premises, rather
than local businesses having to co-locate their goods with us at our delivery facility.

“With the increase in consumers’ desire for convenience and speed, on-demand drone delivery can help address the
costly last-mile delivery challenge, reduce road congestion and emissions, and create new economic opportunities
for businesses by utilising their existing retail space as logistics hubs and fulfilment centres.

“We look forward to continuing to work with the team at Vicinity to further develop new delivery models that can
complement the retail businesses located at Grand Plaza, and if successful, potentially roll out similar models in
other locations across Vicinity’s retail property portfolio.”

I for one welcome our drone delivery gods – bring it on.