Instacart will offer a same-day delivery option at Walmart locations in four U.S. cities: Los Angeles, San Francisco, San Diego and Tulsa. (CNBC)

Talking point: With grocery delivery and curbside pickup booming due to the pandemic, grocers are rethinking the services they provide to consumers—and Instacart is both benefiting and struggling in the process. Since March, it has added hundreds of thousands of new contract workers and raised US$325 million in new financing, giving it a valuation of nearly US$14 billion. Its new partnership with Walmart—Amazon’s primary rival, it has been trying to establish its own grocery-delivery network—could help both the retailer and Instacart fend off growing competition in the grocery wars. Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos acknowledged the competition in his testimony before the House Judiciary antitrust subcommittee last month: “We also face new competition from the likes of Shopify and Instacart—companies that enable traditionally physical stores to put up a full online store almost instantaneously.”