Walmart can run a restaurant delivery service without charging the restaurant.

In September 2026 Walmart added Papa Johns to its US restaurant delivery service, after Subway and Dunkin’.

Walmart added Papa Johns to its restaurant delivery service last Thursday. That’s Subway in June, Dunkin’ two weeks ago, and now a pizza chain with thousands of locations, none of which sit inside a Walmart store.

My first reading was that this was a retail story but I don’t think it is. DoorDash bought Deliveroo and SevenRooms to get from delivery to the table. Uber partnered with OpenTable and is buying Delivery Hero. Walmart hasn’t bought anything. It has more than 4,000 stores, a driver network, and 90% of the US population within ten miles of a store. What it didn’t have was access to restaurants, and it’s now signing them up one national chain at a time.

Subway’s franchise disclosure document sets out the terms: orders placed through Walmart go straight into the restaurant’s own point of sale, there’s no fee to take part, for now, and the restaurant pays card processing. The customer pays Walmart’s flat Express Delivery fee, and for most orders they’re already paying it, since Walmart says about 65% of restaurant orders arrive bundled with other Walmart items. DoorDash’s published partnership plans run from 15% to 30% of the order.

Walmart can charge the restaurant nothing because it isn’t trying to make money on the restaurant, and Walmart CEO John Furner told investors in August that restaurant partnerships let Walmart take a bigger share of what people spend on food every day.

Square did something similar in July when it added restaurant ordering to ChatGPT with no marketplace commission. In both cases the company already had the customer, or already ran the restaurant’s system, so it cost them very little to open the channel. DoorDash and Uber don’t have that option. Commissions are their business model.

Papa Johns’ CEO said on the August earnings call that third-party delivery transactions were down and that he wanted the money spent there to work harder. A month later the company signed with Walmart. Whether it got the same terms as Subway isn’t published, but there’s no reason to assume it accepted worse.

This is US only and chains only. Subway and Dunkin’ were already Walmart tenants and Papa Johns has the scale to negotiate. Nothing has been said about independents and I wouldn’t expect anything soon.

If you’re an operator the point is simpler than all that. DoorDash, Uber and now Walmart are each trying to own the point where someone decides what to eat tonight, and they’ve each arrived with a different cost structure. DoorDash and Uber only get paid if they take a slice of the order. Walmart has just shown it can run the same service without one, and DoorDash and Uber will have to price against that.