Potato by air

The Wing Hummingbird 7000W-B delivery drone weighs less than 15 pounds. It has 16 propellers — four for horizontal movement and 12 for vertical — a top speed of 60 miles per hour, a carrying capacity of up to 2.7 pounds, and a delivery radius of about six miles. It is authorized by the FAA for beyond-line-of-sight piloting. As a feat of engineering, it is impressive.So far I’ve mostly used it to send people potatoes.It all started a few Sunday mornings ago when my neighbor Will added me and a half dozen other local dads to a group chat. I only recognized a few of the numbers.“Anyone looking for dumb stuff to entertain the kids?” he wrote, under a video of a drone lowering a blue doggie bag into his backyard. He’d discovered that we were now in the delivery range for drone service Wing’s partnership with Walmart, and could get household items dropped onto our lawns in 25 minutes. “Hopefully liquor store will get on board soon.”Ever since I saw the video of an Amazon drone dropping a package in someone’s pool, I’ve needed to know one thing: Do you have to order drone delivery to your own yard? I raised the question in the chat.Will, a few minutes later: “Nathan I just ordered you a potato to see if I can send to other people. 8 minutes out.”Two minutes after that, a neighbor named Rick: “Will just want you to know you’re going to get your potato first.”Rick and Will had each scanned the list of deliverable items — over two thousand of them — and independently arrived at the same conclusion. “There is currently an air strike squadron of potatoes headed to our neighborhood,” Rick wrote.At 12:14PM, a drone dropped a doggie bag in my yard. It contained a single russet potato and a bottle of water. Three minutes later, another arrived in Will’s yard, also containing a single potato and a bottle of water. (The water bottle seems to have been added as ballast; every Wing order I’ve placed came with one.)Someone posted “The drones are everywhere.” Those of us who hadn’t met introduced ourselves. An apparently more practical dad named Jason ordered himself a pair of gloves. Dev, who lives in the next development over, was just out of drone range and could only watch in envy. Eventually, a storm rolled in and the potato drones tapered off.My sixth-grader turned our sky potato into oven fries; Will baked his.The wild thing — aside from the fact that you can just order a drone delivery to someone else’s yard — is that each potato delivery cost 82 cents. Total. Each order came from the Walmart Supercenter a few miles away. Wing is absolutely losing money on this. There’s no minimum order, there’s no delivery fee, and the prices are the same as in-store. Wing’s not even collecting sales tax. Welcome back, millennial lifestyle subsidy!At these prices, if you’re not using drones to send potatoes to your neighbors you’re leaving money on the table. That evening, I remembered that my friend Bill had been going through a rough time lately.I sent him a potato.Okay, technically, Wing’s terms of service state “You will not use the Service to engage in any unlawful behavior, or to cause harassment, nuisance, annoyance or inconvenience to Wing, its users or any other person.” And I can definitely see ways you could abuse the system to do that.While I lacked actual permission to land a drone potato in Bill’s yard, based on our relationship, I was confident I had spiritual permission. (This was confirmed a couple of days later when he asked me to drone deliver some candy for his kids. I sent the candy, and then another potato, and then the link to the Wing app.)So what’s stopping someone from using this to harass people, beyond your own moral compass and the fact that they ask you not to? When I asked what safeguards the company had in place to prevent unauthorized deliveries, Wing spokesperson Jessie Poole-Strang wrote:Wing has safely completed over 1 million residential drone deliveries, averaging thousands per day. Customers must be physically present for their first order, and every order requires a verified account and confirmation of a clear delivery zone. Just like traditional delivery or mailing a package, customers can choose to send an order to a friend or family member’s address that lives in eligible service areas. In the rare event a resident ever has a concern about a delivery to their property, our support team can help (support@wing.com).Now, is drone delivery wasteful? If you’re only buying a single lightweight item — like a stick of deodorant, a bottle of sunscreen, or a potato — it seems more environmentally friendly than driving to the store. And as long as it’s subsidized, it’s way cheaper than DoorDash or whatever people use. I could see situations where it would be genuinely useful, especially if you can’t leave the house but you desperately need a bottle of ibuprofen and a Gatorade (for example). And of course it would be preposterous to DoorDash someone a single raw potato.Of course, once you order more than a pound or so of stuff, that math goes off the rails. One afternoon, my wife ordered a box of frozen horchata mochi and a pint of gelato — among the few frozen desserts on the list. They arrived in two separate drones, three minutes apart, and each came with a small bottle of water. They held up surprisingly well during their 7-minute trips in the full Texas sun, considering the total lack of insulation. But it did feel silly to get two drones for two items.That’s how they get you, of course. They hook you with convenience while hiding the true cost of the service. Drone delivery further squeezes gig workers in an already shrinking labor market, and it’s one more excuse for big companies to suppress wages. You don’t have to pay a drone, and you don’t have to tip it, either.It’s been just over three weeks since we found out we had access to subsidized drone delivery. Aside from the two desserts and a couple of bags of gummy Nerds clusters, I’ve only used it to send potatoes to the dads. I sent three last week, plus one to myself to throw them off the scent. I’ve probably blown my cover now.The other day someone — not me — escalated and sent Rick a broccoli potato soup. I’m pretty sure it was Will.What have I learned from all of this? Well, I now know a few more people in my neighborhood. I’ve learned that drone delivery is way more useful to me than agentic AI has ever been. And that given the opportunity to airdrop subsidized potatoes to my friends, I’ll take it.Follow topics and authors from this story to see more like this in your personalized homepage feed and to receive email updates.Nathan Edwards