You are wasting money if you pay for Amazon Prime without checking what Walmart Plus actually does at the cash register. People treat these two retail giants like identical twins. They are not. One lives purely in your browser box shipments. The other dominates the physical strip mall down your street. Choosing between them comes down to whether you care more about streaming movies or saving actual cash on groceries and gas.
Let's look at the price tag first. Walmart Plus costs ninety-eight dollars a year or twelve dollars and ninety-five cents monthly. Amazon Prime sits higher at one hundred and thirty-nine dollars annually. That forty-dollar gap matters. If you qualify for government assistance, Walmart Plus Assist drops the price by half, making it forty-nine dollars a year. Amazon offers a similar discount for EBT holders, but most shoppers ignore these programs entirely.
The real battle isn't about the annual fee. It is about logistics. Amazon rules online fulfillment with fast shipping on millions of items. Walmart fights back by weaponizing its physical footprint. Nearly ninety percent of Americans live within ten miles of a Walmart store. That changes everything about how free delivery works.
How Walmart Plus and Amazon Prime Handle Delivery
Amazon Prime built its empire on doorstep convenience. You click a button. A brown box arrives two days later, or sometimes the same afternoon. You get Prime Video, Amazon Music, and photo storage bundled in. It feels like an all-inclusive digital resort.
Walmart Plus attacks delivery from a different angle. Free shipping on items shipped by Walmart has no order minimum. But if you want groceries delivered from your local store, you need a thirty-five-dollar minimum order. Miss that threshold and you pay a small fee.
Here is where Walmart quietly wins for families. Your grocery delivery comes from the physical store five miles away. It arrives in hours, not days. You get fresh produce, milk, and meat at identical in-store prices. Amazon relies heavily on Amazon Fresh or Whole Foods for groceries, which often require separate fees or limited geographic availability. If you live outside a major metro area, Amazon's fresh grocery game falls apart completely. Walmart stays reliable.
The Perks Nobody Talks About
Both services pad their membership sheets with random extras to justify the cost. Some are useless fluff. Others save you real money every single week.
Walmart Plus includes a rotating streaming perk, letting members choose between ad-supported Paramount Plus or Peacock. It is not quite as robust as Prime Video, but let's be honest—most people barely watch half the content included in their streaming subscriptions anyway.
Where Walmart destroys Amazon is at the gas pump. Members save up to ten cents per gallon at over thirteen thousand locations, including Exxon, Mobil, and Murphy stations. If you commute daily, that fuel discount alone can pay for the entire annual membership fee within a few months. Amazon has no equivalent fuel savings program.
Then there is Mobile Scan and Go. Anyone who hates waiting in checkout lines will love this feature. You scan items with your phone app as you walk down the aisles, pay digitally, and walk past the traditional registers with a quick QR code scan at the exit. Amazon tried this with cashierless Amazon Go stores, but those experiments scaled back dramatically. Walmart's version works right now in thousands of normal supercenters.
What Amazon Prime Still Does Better
I won't pretend Walmart Plus is superior for everything. Amazon remains the undisputed king of niche e-commerce. If you need weird specialty electronics, obscure books, or third-party seller variety, Amazon's catalog dwarfs Walmart's marketplace.
Prime Video also holds a massive advantage over Walmart's streaming options. If you care about prestige television, live sports like Thursday Night Football, and a polished interface, Amazon wins easily. Walmart's streaming offerings feel like an afterthought bolted on to a retail app.
Customer service leans in Amazon's favor, too. Returning items to Amazon is often as simple as dropping an unboxed item off at a UPS Store or Whole Foods. Walmart Plus offers home returns in select areas where they pick it up from your porch, but the network isn't universal yet.
Which Membership Deserves Your Credit Card
Stop buying both unless you have a specific business reason or run a chaotic household that demands infinite e-commerce.
Sign up for Amazon Prime if you live online, order household goods weekly, and value digital media streaming alongside fast shipping. It costs more, but the ecosystem runs smoothly if you lean into it.
Get Walmart Plus if you buy groceries in bulk, hate waiting in checkout lines, drive a car and buy gas regularly, and want to keep forty extra dollars in your pocket every year. The physical store advantage makes it a much sharper tool for everyday household budgeting. Look at your receipts from last month. Count how many times you bought groceries versus how many times you streamed a movie. Let your spending habits make the final call.
