This is being told as a story about ambitious new services, but right now I bet it's mostly amazon's traditional squeezing of suppliers. Amazon don't need a comprehensive service for them to be worthwhile: they can selectively cut out areas which deliverers currently make the most profit on, and leave the difficult ones.<p>It will be interesting to see if this affects relative prices. It could well mean that generalists have to put up their prices in rural areas.
Mike Moritz saw this coming:<p><a href="http://www.linkedin.com/today/post/article/20130805231302-25760-stop-the-presses-a-new-press-lord-appears" rel="nofollow">http://www.linkedin.com/today/post/article/20130805231302-25...</a><p>In Los Angeles customers who pay $220 up front for Amazon Fresh, the company’s home delivery grocery service, get ‘free’ shipping on orders above $35. It might be ‘free’ but Amazon has their cash. Customers and vendors have helped Amazon build its 90 fulfillment centers, which now enclose about 65 million square feet. That should be enough to make the managements of FedEx and UPS tremble.<p>-----<p>So did Simon Sarris:<p><a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6591112" rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6591112</a><p>It's important to note that if any other company spent until their EPS was negative, investors would flip. Amazon is playing with razor thin margins while trying to scale up a platform to end all platforms that we might someday use for everything without thinking about it. If successful, on that day/year/eon dollar bills might as well be printed with Jeff Bezos' face on them.
Amazon won't be using UPS and Fedex trucks on that day. They'll be using Amazon trucks. You'll know that era when you see it, I think.
If they could deliver me a quad venti latte in 12.5 minutes, then I'd be impressed.<p>But in all seriousness, generally the <i>only</i> thing that has ever been disappointing about ordering from Amazon, is the shipping times. Any time I've ever had to call Amazon because of an issue, I've been impressed with their general attitude toward me and their willingness to <i>fix</i> or go beyond what my original issue was.<p>Having said that, they seem to have some smart people working on logistics for them <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gcXoj_UBXv8" rel="nofollow">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gcXoj_UBXv8</a><p>So it only makes sense for them to move toward the "last mile"
Will this become as successful as their cloud computing business? Most parcels I get are from Amazon anyhow. I guess its that way for many people. They will have an insane headstart going into this business.<p>Personally, I welcome our new delivery overlords. I would like to order stuff and have it at my door 1 hour later.
see previous discussion here - <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7641861" rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7641861</a>
Own delivery network is already happening in India by Amazon where the delivery partners are not that reliable/costly. Surprising to see e-commerce players take solutions from developing markets to developed markets, rather than the other way round.
When i look at the streets and all that stuff that moves around there, i think: its somehow possible to turn this into a internet of things where stuff moves around like tcp packets in a network.<p>Without competition, UPS will probably never get there.