The holiday shopping season is just weeks away, and some of America’s best-known stores are getting a new delivery fleet. On September 30th, DoorDash announced partnerships with Macy’s, Anthropologie, The North Face, Vans, and Timberland, putting their merchandise on its U.S. marketplace, DoorDash for Merchants, with delivery from local stores in as little as an hour. It’s the latest sign that the line between online and in-store shopping has all but disappeared, resulting in American shoppers coming out ahead.
Stores Are Evolving to Become Delivery Hubs
For years, the conventional wisdom was that e-commerce would hollow out physical retail. The numbers tell a different story. According to the U.S. Census Bureau, e-commerce made up 17.1% of total U.S. retail sales in the second quarter of 2026, which means the large majority of retail spending still runs through physical stores and other offline channels.
What is changing is how these stores operate. Macy’s, Anthropologie, and the VF Corp. brands have sold online for decades, but those orders typically shipped from distant warehouses and arrived days later by standard mail or parcel carrier. Now the local store down the street can fill the order and have it on a customer’s doorstep within the hour.
Under DoorDash’s new partnerships, Macy’s is offering goods from more than 350 stores nationwide, Anthropologie is fulfilling orders from more than 220 locations, and the three VF Corp. brands – The North Face, Vans, and Timberland – add another 350+ stores to the service.
For Macy’s, this isn’t entirely new. The department store has provided same-day and next-day delivery using DoorDash Drive’s white-label fulfillment service since 2020. The new deal takes the existing partnership a step further, putting Macy’s merchandise directly on the DoorDash marketplace.
The original 2020 partnership came at a turning point for American retail. As the COVID-19 pandemic kept families at home, online sales jumped more than 30%, and stores acted as fulfillment points, with DoorDash, Instacart, and Uber drivers handling the final stretch. Macy’s, which signed on as DoorDash’s first department store partner, was far from alone in making the leap. Home goods seller Bed Bath & Beyond, beauty chain Sephora, office supplier Staples, and discounter Big Lots all rolled out on-demand delivery through outside platforms in 2020, proof that the model had spread well beyond the grocery aisle.
What began as a pandemic stopgap has become a fixture of how Americans shop. Stores reopened, but shoppers kept the habit, and retailers kept competing to meet it. By 2025, DoorDash said it had become the leading third-party marketplace by order volume across U.S. grocery and retail.
A Market Defined by Competition
DoorDash rival Uber Eats also recently partnered with Foot Locker in July and expanded Costco delivery nationwide in September. DoorDash itself has also recently added Gap, Costco, Barnes & Noble, and Kohl’s.
Costco in particular has long been a store built around the car, with warehouses often on the suburban fringe and bulk packages that are hard to haul home on a bus or on foot. Now a city dweller, an older shopper who no longer drives, or any Costco member without access to a vehicle can get those same bulk savings brought to their door.
A company that started out delivering restaurant meals in 2013 is now competing to deliver sweaters and sneakers. This is what a competitive market looks like. Companies built for one lane crossing into another to win customers.
Lawmakers in Washington, D.C., and state capitals keep proposing laws built on the premise that retail is stagnant and a few players hold all the cards. But the market keeps moving faster than the regulators. Partnerships like DoorDash and Macy’s form and expand in months, and regulation written for a snapshot of today’s market risks freezing in place an industry that reinvents itself every season.
Policymakers should let this competition play out, not saddle it with innovation-killing regulation that makes it harder for retailers of every size to meet customers where they are.
Image via Unsplash.