Imagine being able to walk out to your car in the morning and finding a cup of steaming coffee sitting by your car that had been delivered moments earlier by a drone from Walmart.

Now, you won’t have to imagine, because City Council on Tuesday voted 4-1 to approve two variances of the city zoning rules to allow the drone service – the first Walmart drone delivery hub of its kind in Florida.

The proposal by Wing LLC for the Walmart Supercenter on Johns Lake Road both intrigued and worried Council members.

Would the drones be allowed to cross busy State Road 50 and U.S. 27? Would their cameras invade the privacy of someone sunbathing in their back yard? Will they carry a heavy payload? What if they land in the wrong place? And the biggest question seemed to be: What about aesthetics?

Wing requested eight-foot fence instead of six to secure the area in the parking lot and asked permission for a long-standing shipping container.

“I commend the creativity and the industriousness of it,” says Councilwoman Alison Strange. “This is an interesting time we’re living in. My concern with the fence and the [shipping] crate, as crazy as it might sound since we’re talking about Walmart, is the beautification of the space. When I look at the picture, I see industrial, I see it looking like an imprisonment camp when I look at it.”

The drone operation will be in two different areas of the parking lot. One area will be where the goods are auto-loaded. The other is where the drones will be stored and utilized. She said she would be less concerned if the “drone nest” is near where the trucks are parked.

Councilman Bryan Bain was also concerned with the look of a long-standing shipping container. He was the lone no-vote.

He later told Style Magazine that it might not be so bad at Wal-Mart because of its topography, but companies like Amazon and other big-box stores on flatter terrain might look like a prison to passersby instead of the look Clermont is going for.

The open-ended time for the shipping container also troubles him. “Is it going to be five months or five years?”

Eric Vaughn with Wing answered a flurry of questions for the Council but said he did not know if the drones would be allowed by the federal government to cross the busy highways.

Walmart had an earlier drone service with a different company and was restricted by the FAA.

On the other issues, he said the drones would carry only 2.4 pounds of cargo and would not land but lower merchandise by cable 25 feet off the ground. The cameras, which are “more like sensors,” would not have high-resolution cameras that could spy on sunbathers. Customers will use an app to designate where on the property they want their goods.

“Drones are getting better and better,” Eric says, and by mid-year might be able to double the payload. The current drone wingspread is 4-by-5 feet.

The company has drones at Walmart in Dallas-Fort Worth, Texas, and last week started operations in Atlanta.

Customers must be within a 6-mile radius of Walmart, will operate in daylight, at least initially, and it won’t just be coffee that will drop down from the sky.

Eric, a single dad, said he recently called for a drone delivery of Tylenol for his sick child rather than taking him to a store in the car.

He said the engines are designed to mimic neighborhood sounds, like a lawn mower or a car going 40 mph.

 The motion for approval carried, but it carries with it a demand for some kind of wrap to make the shipping container look more appealing. It will be reviewed by staff before it comes back.