If you haven’t been living under a rock this week, you’ve no doubt heard about Amazon’s new endeavor, Prime Air, a delivery system designed to get packages into customers’ hands in 30 minutes or less using unmanned drones. Watch the video here….
Well, Walmart has an idea in mind to squash their biggest competitor….
Bentonville, AR — Walmart today announced plans to install mini surface-to-air missile batteries on the rooftops of all 4,786 store locations across the United States. The missiles will exclusively target Amazon Prime Air drones.
The new concept called Walmart Megatron is the latest effort to drive customers back to retail locations. While Walmart’s growth has remained steady, it has been unable to keep pace with online retailers such as Amazon.
“Customers are consistently choosing convenience over traditional in person retail shopping,” John Simmons, head of Walmart’s Megatron division tells us. “We face a problem in the coming years. Either we do what we can to increase convenience, something the retail division has failed to do, or we start declaring war on online retailers. Personally I am ready to blow up some drones.”
The Megatron missiles will be miniaturized surface to air missile based on the RIM-174 Standard ERAM. The missiles are 7 inches long and in testing showed the capability to target an Amazon drone up to 10 miles away. The missile batteries are equipped with special camera equipment calibrated to search for the Amazon arrow on the side of the Prime Air drones and fire automatically.
“We have seen 99.9% success rate in taking down test drones,” Simmons tells us. “The only problem we had was a local kid who picked an Amazon box up above his head in excitement. The system mistook it for a drone and blew the kid’s new Playstation 4 into small pieces. Good thing we offer Playstation and all other game consoles at an every day low price.”
Walmart says they plan to recover the downed drones and use the recycled parts to build an android workforce specifically programed to not complain about vacation time and health insurance.
(Thanks for the laugh, RockCityTimes!)
