This is a great step.<p>I think what would complete this is if you could leave items in the bag that you sell on Amazon Marketplace, and Amazon would pick them up and deliver them to the buyer.<p>Then you'd potentially have a packaging-less, production-free, nearly energy-ideal system for moving around used goods.<p>Imagine instead of having a tag sale, you'd just scan everything you want to get rid of into Amazon, and they'd come pick things up as they find new homes for them.<p>Add in automatic market-based pricing, and you basically have near perfect liquidity for used goods. That'd be radical.<p>The step after that is just to allow people to distribute home-produced goods. Harvest tomatoes from your back yard on ToteDay, drop them into Amazon mini-totes, and have them delivered, at market prices, to people in your area.<p>It'd be like the economics of the App Store applied to all goods.<p>Shit, I'm going to go apply for a job at Amazon.
One day in and the Woot acquisition is already bearing fruit -- Amazon is now selling Woot's famous "bags of crap."<p>Being Prime subscribers, my wife and I get a shipment from Amazon usually on a weekly basis. I might try this just because I'm sick of throwing away Amazon boxes. Bags I can send back seems like a nice idea.<p>edit: Bad design on the part of Amazon. It lets me sign in with my account to see when my delivery dates would be, and even gives me an answer once I've signed in. However it doesn't tell me that all of the shipping addresses on my account are thousands of miles away from the only place the service is offered.
Who Remembers <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kozmo.com" rel="nofollow">http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kozmo.com</a> :)<p>note: Don't take the above comment to mean I think Amazon is going to fail with this. 10 years ago an unknown company couldn't make this work. Im sure Amazon will do fine in Seattle with this.
Ironically, I feel so bad when I order five things in one order (ship when everything is ready, free shipping) and them Amazon sends me five different packages at great expense, that I am almost relieved they are offering this.
I wonder: Is Amazon now trying to compete with Fedex? What's the benefit to them of building out a shipping network on top of their distribution network?<p>I'm sure there's some margin that could be potentially captured - and it might be neat to be dealing just with amazon - but why not focus on stuff that doesn't involve becoming a competitor to established shipping services. In my view, the US Postal services are already kind of underpriced....
I love the idea of it but at the same time I feel like most items you require on a weekly basis should really be obtained in a more sustainable way. It's wonderful we can (currently) afford this luxury of putting items on an airplane, flying them to a local hub, and driving them right to your house twice a week but there's more to consider than just the cost of the service itself.
I live in 98112 and nothing is showing the Tote button, even items with local same-day delivery available (another fine Amazon perk for Seattle residents). Where are the Tote-able items hiding?