Remember the motto of the Clinton Presidential campaign back in 1992: “It’s the economy, stupid!” That election was about the economy and Clinton won as a result. Well Amazon.com this week let slip its plan to open 300-400 bookstores in U.S. cities, sending Wall Street analysts into a tizzy because bookstores look to them like a lousy business even for the world’s biggest bookseller. But this isn’t about selling books. This Amazon plan — if it happens at all — is about creating bases from which to fly delivery drones.
Delivery drones are to me a stupid idea except in certain rare circumstances like flying prescriptions to people living on remote islands. But Amazon is acting like they actually mean it. And if they do mean it, then they’ll need a place from which to fly those drones.
For all the claims that Amazon could deliver packages by drone for $0.20 each, current FAA regulations say every drone has to have a licensed human pilot, not on board but in control by radio. I calculate this will add at least $12.00 to every drone delivery making drones not a sound business at all. But Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos is a long-term thinker and I’m sure his drone plan has them flying autonomously some years in the future following a complete about-face by the FAA.
Maybe Bezos is right in which case it makes sense for Amazon to be prepared with drone bases in cities above a certain size. But what size is that?
Despite the dream of drone delivery to customers in the wilderness, the economics of drone delivery argue for it being an urban service. The places where drone delivery make a lot of sense are densely populated cities with high disposable incomes and terrible traffic — places like New York, Los Angeles and, yes, Seattle.
So each “bookstore” is actually an automated warehouse with a small retail book operation and loading dock at street level and a large aerial operation on the roof. Deliveries have to be autonomous and probably no more than 10 minutes away from the Amazon location. Average speeds for such drone copters are probably 20 miles-per-hour with a top speed of 30. That means deliveries would be within a 3-5 mile radius of the Amazon locations.
Let’s say when the drone bases are maximally busy they are launching one drone per minute (just a guess). If a round-trip averages 15 minutes that means each drone could fly four times per hour so you’d need about 15 drones per base, but make it 20 drones to account for maintenance and spares.
You can be sure these exact calculations have already been made at Amazon.
If the drones can be operated safely, using them is a no-brainer in dense urban areas. I suspect Amazon’s Geographical Information Systems (GIS) people have learned a lot from the distribution of mobile telephone cells, which also follow population and economic trends. Anywhere that has phone cells below a certain average diameter (the smaller the cell the denser the population) would be prime territory for, well, Amazon Prime.
What’s suddenly fascinating to me about this idea is looking at cell tower maps, two of which are on this page. Above we have Manhattan, chock full of cells. And here to the left we have Bentonville, Arkansas, home of WalMart. Looking at this map of Bentonville — a city with 40,000 people and a population density of about 1900 people per square mile. Every one of those folks are within three miles of a cell tower and — presumably — a future Amazon base.
Amazon has to have figured not just a population density but an income density that can support drone delivery. Look at census numbers, do the math, and you’ll see that the people of Bentonville earn $55 million per square mile per year. If we establish Bentonville as the lower bound of populations suitable for economical drone delivery, there are approximately 400 U.S. cities bigger than Bentonville in terms of both population and income density.
How many bookstores is Amazon planning to open — 400? Make that 400 cities, not 400 stores.
What’s key here is Amazon is relying on a change of U.S. government policy. Maybe the rise of self-driving cars will make autonomous drones easier for bureaucrats to accept. But my experience having been a pilot for more than 40 years is that the FAA doesn’t like change at all and sure as Hell doesn’t like change that’s foisted upon them.
Or does Jeff Bezos know something the rest of us don’t?
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Also owning the Capitol’s ambient news source has its privileges, not least of which is an apparently perfectly legal cross-subsidy by way of editorial license and pursuit of happiness. In the main, and the Internet notwithstanding, the press is still only free to those who can afford one.
I would point out that they don’t have to start out using drones; Amazon’s already using drop boxes for people who want something delivered somewhere other than their house. An Amazon ‘bookstore’ that’s supplied with the products most desired in that 5 mile region, deliverable to a drop box right there after a few minutes, gives them virtually the flexibility of a regular store – without all the employees.
failed old Kmarts are at about that density…
And Radio Shacks.
Radio Shack stores don’t have the height for racking, or the square footage to even start considering warehousing in them. almost none were in locations where you could build truck docks. the surplus RS locations are fit for purse botiques.
OK, so Amazon sets up its shop and starts flying drones from the roof. But where do the drones land? How will they deliver to somebody living on the 30th floor? And above all, what happens when a drone fails and falls onto a crowded 5th Avenue?
There should be a independently-powered watchdog system that, if the primary system locks up, loses communication, or loses power, the watchdog system kicks in, cuts power to the rotors, and ejects a parachute. It then coasts down gently with no spinning rotors.
Anything coming down onto people from the sky that’s more substantial than balloons filled with air, confetti, or glitter is going to cause accidents and make people upset, regardless of the size of its parachute.
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Anyway, parachutes aren’t magic; the only things they can make “coast down gently” are objects that are already very light weight. Even a moderate breeze can give something under a parachute a substantial amount of sideways momentum, and its landing is not going to be “gentle.”
Even Cringely can’t be dumb enough to think amazon will really use delivery drones in any number. Any 3 year old knows this is nuts. If the idea ever got beyond the marketing idiots, the lawyers would slam it down — much like the drones that would be hitting power lines and trees on every block.
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Amazon was never a profitable company. That means management is incompetent. They are opening brick/mortar stores because they have no ideas and the final decline has begun. If you own stock in this company you’d best be hitting the sell button soon.
I’d be happy to buy your $AMZN shares if you want to dump them
Mark – I don’t want to own AMZN either, for the same reasons you gave, plus its current 450 P/E ratio. (Apple, on the other hand, currently has a P/E of 10, and regularly makes lots of money. Go figure.) Some people buy the stock because they see it going up much of the time and want to cash in. Others anticipate one of their wild ideas finally making them into some kind of monopoly that makes lots of money.
Do you know what actually makes a fair amount of money for Amazon? Their cloud services. It’s a byproduct of their needing lots of servers to run their retail business.
As far as drones, wouldn’t major shippers like UPS start using them, too, if they made sense? I’m not saying that they do or don’t make sense, but if they do, then Amazon won’t be the only one using them.
Why do I get the feeling Mark is buying shares in AMZN as he simultaneously tries to convince others to sell and to lower their stock price, and Mark secretly hopes that Amazon’s bet pays off after all?
Suppose Amazon delivers first by regular mail an one square foot patch printed with an easily recognizable pattern by AI that flies the drone, along with instructins to place the marker in an 6×6 feet area with clear view to the sky. If you can meet these conditions, you qualify for drone delivery.
Probably drone delivery will be fully autonomous, but wil feature a ‘pilot assist’ mode for tricky situatins and to satisfy the FAA. One pilot can shepperd a pretty sizable flock of drones so the cost gets dissipated.
How about doing it the other way around? Amazon use the stores as landing pads for their drone deliveries, so you can order something and go collect it from the store, and it will be there (by drone from the warehouse) before you can get there. Local shop with massive stock. Or pay someone to walk from the store to you for a bit extra?
This time I strongly disagree with you, Bob.
Delivery drones are to reasonable people a stupid idea. Period.
Delivery drones is “buzzword”, “vaporware”, “stock exchange bait”, “marketing fluff”.
It’s the delivery, stupid!
Only an insane entrepreneur would rely on an unreliable delivery system when the delivery is a central part of the business.
As you said, cities are crowded with skyscrapers. Thousands of delivery destinations tightly packed within a small space. Will they be able to deliver a parcel to the right spot? How? By entering the windows? By landing on the roofs? Who will pick the parcel up? No way!
Suburbs with single-family houses with front gardens would be easier but then the drones would require much longer coverage capabilities.
Not to talk about the safety of people with malfunctioning drones (or bad weather) and the safety of the delivered goods. It’d be too easy to hijack a drone to steal stuff.
N O W A Y !
How much does it cost to deliver a parcel less than a pound or two? How long does it take for delivery?
Amazon is keeping these calculations up to date on a daily basis, I bet.
So, I see all this unfeasible. Just like you, Bob.
Let’s imagine for a moment that those “bookstores” (quotes are intentional) aren’t bases from which to fly delivery drones. They could be lockers with temporary access code where the stuff is delivered. You receive the code, go there a pick your parcel up.
Those would then be bases where delivery drones are headed to.
Maybe this could make senses, even without drones but with normal, old fashioned delivery methods.
What’s your opinion?
Bricks and mortar are unnecessary for drones. Send trucks from the warehouse to designated points (after-hours elementary school parking lots for example, which school districts would be happy to rent by the hour), open up the top of the trailer, and your drone fleet disperses to a much smaller radius than a store could service. Out and back in 90 minutes, your truck heads back to the DC. And wait until self-driving trucks become feasible – Amazon would be all over that.
I selected elementary school parking lots since a town has more of them than other large parking areas, and they’re not used after hours as much as middle- and high-school facilities especially during 4-7pm when people would more likely be home to receive their packages. There are probably other options too.
This is more appropriate outside dense urban areas however, so if the stores are urban AND they find a way to have drones be a part of multi-story delivery that might work.
So I imagine our Amazon checkout screen is going to display something like this:
We have determined that your delivery can be done by a drone. Please choose a delivery type:
1) Drone
2) Truck
Now, what happens if I am not at home when the drone lands? Does it somehow detect that I am not available, and fly back to the store, or fly forward to the next drop site? Or does it just drop the package on my front lawn and scurry away?
Or maybe, when it’s within 100 meters of my house, it talks to my Nest thermostat, finds out that I am ‘away’ and decides not to land after all. Hmm..maybe I foresee a partnership between Amazon and Alphabet…”Amazon, now a member of the Works With Nest program!”
Are there a lot of rich people in Bentonville who aren’t named Walton?
Or is it like averaging my net worth with Bill Gates’s and saying that between the two of us we have an amazingly large amount of money?
[irony]I think we will see driverless flying cars before we see practical delivery drones[/irony]
Do the current FAA regulations require that the licensed human pilot can only fly one drone at a time? Can they not have a single human “flying” a fleet of software controlled drones?
Current FAA regulations require that any drone approved for commercial use remain within sight of the pilot.
Nope. They’re building their own delivery system – a replacement for UPS/Fedex and/or the US Postal Service. Drones may be involved down the line, but for now they’re going to put that fleet of trucks to use.
I love speculating without evidence!
Interesting. The drones could just be a smoke screen for their own delivery service. It lets them get going without UPS and Fedex renegotiating bulk contracts to extract value before they get replaced.
When the FAA says no, Amazon just falls back to private delivery, but only for the low cost, high margin areas. Sneaky.
A couple of months ago I wrote to Amazon to ask if I could “opt out.” Surprise: no response.
I live in an isolated wetlands preserve mainly set aside for shore birds that run from Piping Plovers to Osprey and even a few American Eagles. I pointed out that drones seemed counter intuitive to this area’s ethos. Also explained I am profoundly deaf and even with the most powerful aids in the world, I cannot discern the direction the little sound I pick up is coming from.
I garden in spades and said that given my situation, if not permitted to opt out, not only would I leave Amazon completely but that I would ask my few human neighbors to join me on behalf of our non-shopping feathered friends.
Bezos is either puffing up his world again or has lost touch with reality. I still have, I believe, the right to live in peace and will fight to hold onto that.
So you want to opt out of a program that doesn’t even exist yet? Aren’t you being a tiny bit unreasonable here?
For once, I think you’re missing the bigger picture here, Bob. This isn’t so much about drones as it is logistics in general. This is the one expense that Amazon has been trying to exert the most control in and what Wall Street pinged them for in the last earnings report. They have already made moves to privatize their fleets and the stores would serve as great hubs for not only drones but local deliveries. Throw in the option of picking it up at the store yourself for a lower cost and you have a great infrastructure. The book stores have been idle and can be bought at a song. You now also have both a closer point for returns and face to face customer service as well as a showroom to sell Amazon hardware in a non competitive environment as opposed to a Best Buy where store in a store concepts put AMZ hardware a step away from Google, MS, Apple and Samsung. I’m surprised to not only see you mention this, but also mention that the source of the story has come under question.
Why would you need drones for this? What about delivery by bicycle or motor scooter? I don’t think there will be an issue with government regulations and you don’t need a pilot’s license to ride a bike.
Bezos owns the Washington Post. He will get EXACTLY what he wants when he wants it. Witness the holy war waged against Apple for their books while Amazon gets left completely alone. The FAA will reverse their decision upon Bezos’ command. In fact their current ban may also be at Bezos’ command, to discourage competitors from developing competing services by giving them the impression that autonomous droned are and always be illegal.
This is “Plane Crazy”!
“Or does Jeff Bezos know something the rest of us don’t?” So … it’s a big secret that whoever “lobbies” politicians with election campaign cash – then later on also actually writes the legislation?
Bezos is reaching further than he can grasp with this drone silliness. anything they can do, a guy in a truck can do better. no drone is going to slide past the doorman and get a signature from the front desk in a high-rise condo. never get through the revolving door. drone, GPS module, and control desk are more costly than farming the delivery in East Someplace out to the USPS.
Just renember, he also owns the Washington Post…. Get it now?
two editorials a week in the WaPo won’t make a jot of difference. 100 years ago, or in 1972-3-4, WaPo had big power in Washington. today the factious warriors of Congress don’t give a rat’s… ear… what anybody thinks except their financial benefactors, they are locked solo without reservations on their own agendas. no influence, no compromise, better failed and tossed out than to give an inch.
“Bricks and mortar are unnecessary for drones.” or “Pop-up retail, also known as pop-up store (pop-up shop in the UK, Australia and Ireland) or flash retailing, is a trend of opening short-term sales spaces in Canada, the United States,[1][2] the United Kingdom and Australia.[3]”
I think warehouses are too different from stores. Stores are in places with lots of foot traffic to attract shoppers. Warehouses are in cheaper areas. The layout is different. Stores look pretty for the customers with careful layouts. Warehouses are optimized for efficiency. Once-per-minute deliveries from a store would disrupt operations too much and cost too much to keep everything in order for customers. Plus, these are bookstores, and I assume the highest need for quick deliveries would be more in line with what’s in a drug store or supermarket.
Ikea looks like a store + warehouse to me. And in the UK they have a chain called Argos where you order goods from a printed catalogue and the staff go out the back and get them, no showroom.
goods droned from centralized warehouses to pop up shops – where bike couriers take over and complete the delivery! ….maybe
please check your spelling
“The elction was about the economy”
Just a way to cut delivery cost so instead of delivery they ask the customer to pick them up themselves.
For the analysts they will add another $200 to Amazon shares…/s
http://techcrunch.com/2016/02/03/no-amazon-is-not-planning-a-network-of-300-400-bookstores/
Amazon just refunded my $99 Amazon Prime membership, which I demanded because they couldn’t get anything to me in two days. Rots of ruck with drones or drop boxes or whatever cockamamie idea they’ve come up with this week.
Prime is not so much about 2-day delivery as it is about lower overall shipping costs. If you don’t spend more than $99/year on shipping, then don’t get it.
I could argue the opposite – that drones makes the most sense in the least dense areas. Sure, urban areas have bad traffic but they also have a lot of people. So, one truck can carry packages for lots of people, and maybe even make stops from which they can deliver packages for multiple people. On the other hand, in a rural area, not only does each shipment require a separate delivery stop, but it probably also requires driving way more miles to make the delivery. By this measure, urban delivery is more efficient than rural delivery.
I’m still not convinced that drone delivery will make sense anywhere, but that’s a different question.
Having a drone depot withing 10 minutes of a customer opens up a new possibility: scheduling delivery. Currently we think of delivery as being asynchronous with our lives, which raises PeterR’s question about how to deliver to the 30th floor. Plus scheduling deals with a lot of security issues.
A bookstore and a drone base, oh my.
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Does anyone else hear the imperial theme music from Star Wars in their head right now? Anyone?
“Jeff, I am your Accountant…”
Every holiday season firms like UPS hire extras to help with deliveries. My son worked for UPS a couple times. The helper rides on a delivery truck and runs the packages to the door. While the helper is dropping off the package the driver can be getting the next delivery ready. With a helper a single truck can delivery to twice as many homes.
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A truck can carry and deliver 100’s of packages. A drone can handle only a few, maybe one. Add in the time needed for a drone to fly back and forth delivering one package at a time — and you have a pretty inefficient delivery system.
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What I could see delivery firms and Amazon doing is adding a drone to their delivery trucks. The truck comes to your street and then the drone brings the package to your door. I think this is a much more likely application of drones by Amazon.
My theory..
I think Amazon will use drones to ship products from a warehouse to a store front. Remove the middle man – the trucking / delivery industry. Amazon may have larger drones, shipping more products from the Port of entry (warehouse) to a store front.
It doesn’t make sense to have a drone deliver to a home, especially an apartment. But this sounds like the old milk delivery system. The milk man would deliver a set of glass bottles into a milk box, that was usually built into the side of a home or a it’s a metal/wooden box with a lid……
People will have to have some kind of landing pad at their home, or for an apartment, convince the landlord to have landing pad on the top of the roof for amazon Deliveries….(Blade Runner)
Maybe Amazon will because a done only like delivery platform similar to UPS or FedEx. Making deliveries Port to warehouse, or warehouse to warehouse.
It would be interesting to see the Amazon locations in relation to nearby USPS locations. Recently I placed an order with an ecommerce vendor, who estimated delivery to be the following Saturday by UPS. The next day I got an email from UPS saying, “If you would like to pay an extra fee, we can deliver your package on Friday.” Having already paid what I considered a high shipping charge from the vendor, I declined. The package tracking data showed UPS delivered the package to my USPS office on Friday, and the package was delivered by my mail carrier on Saturday. I have heard similar stories from others. The “last 3 miles” seems to be the most expensive part of the delivery, especially for residential, so why not partner with an organization that is already mandated to go those last 3 miles to every U.S. address 6 days per week? UPS becomes, like Amazon, a distribution company, with USPS using it’s existing extensive network of local offices and carriers to handle the final delivery. No drones required.
Perhaps the reason Amazon is now looking into opening lots of local bookstores/delivery centers is because with the new FAA rules they’ve realized that drone deliveries are *not* going to be feasible, after all. So this would actually be a strategy shift *away* from drones.
Or is it there an Amazon prime now warehouse in the back? Forget drones, bicycles have proven more useful recently.
Ain’t gonna happen.
Much of that income density comes from many people living in apartments and condos — the vast majority of which do not have someone waiting at the front door to pick up a delivery. So the drone drops off a package and the first available person picks it up (and the “first available person” is not likely to be the intended recipient).
But I suppose there actually is a business reason for doing the preliminaries: this is a great way to wring even more cost savings from the various delivery companies as Amazon threatens to take a huge chunk of business from them unless they reduce their charges to Amazon.
Or maybe the retail stores will be used as a basis for selling other things. Perhaps it is like an Apple store, only they don’t feel like hyping it.
Yet another problem for Amazon using drones. Alot of people who work the night shift will be mad at Amazon. Sending drones into neighborhoods that have dogs outside will be problematic. When all of the dogs in the neighborhood are raising hell at the same time, it going to wake up people who trying to sleep. The people working night shift already have enough problems trying to sleep during the day.
It’s briliant! Once Amazon figures out how to effectively and legally use drones for whatever, the are the leader. Fedex, Dhl, Ups, everybody will have to offer the same. Amazon will have a serious leg up on everybody, and I’ll bet you $1000 to a donut that they will have so many patents and intellectual property in this space they will make skillions. And they will be happy to sell you FAA certified delivery drones through Amazon.com.
Ya Think!!!!!
Bob, I think what’s hiding in plain sight is both nastier and more obvious than your conjecture.
Bezos is building bookstores to kill bookstores. Barnes & Noble is dying too slowly for his tastes. When they are dead, Bezos will be the only customer for every publishing house in the world. He will own them without having to buy them.
Owning bookstores sets up this neat death-spiral:
– Bezos builds nice stores with great environments, and sells every bestseller from the last decade at near cost.
– Barnes and Noble (among others) folds.
– Bezos is now in a position to force publishers to sell to him at lower prices — they have no alternative.
– Publishers react to their squeezed margins by slashing royalties & author advances.
– Simultaneously, Bezos vastly increases royalties and advances he pays authors who go direct and publish only through Amazon.
So by running a bunch of bookstores at a loss for a few years, Bezos destroys the NY publishing world and positions Amazon as both first choice and last resort for authors.
Of course, this would be unthinkable in a country with a functioning Justice Department — but that ain’t the U.S. Particularly when the paper in the capital is owned by — this is getting boring!
(I do think drone deliveries will come eventually. But owning content and disintermediating all of *publishing itself* is the play here.)
Two more thoughts on the same idea:
What else sells really well in book stores apart from books? accessories, electronics, ebook [cough]Kindle[cough] readers…. And coffee! Plenty of coffee! In fact so much coffee is bought in bookstore cafes, that the revenue from coffee probably surpasses that from books. I wonder if the bookstores idea is really a means to get into brick and mortar retail in a big way. Not to mention a competition to Starbucks!
Secondly, and this is probably a more realistic and immediate benefit: bookstores will give Amazon a venue to connect directly with readers through events such as book-signing and reading groups. This is a customer engagement channel that Amazon simply does not have right now.
What is the legality of skeet shooting drones? I’d use paint ball, bb, or air pellet, so very low human risk. I’d order something Just to get the target practice!
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Oh, and really good article and really great comments! You’re getting some great cloud sourcing here.
A few major issues I see without thinking too long about it.
1. Keeping inventory in all those locations seems unlikely
2. Weather – huge factor in so many parts of the country
3. Permissions to fly drones over private property, Who is going to be OK with a drone pilot peeping in on their family swimming in the backyard pool?
4. If in the city, how on Earth does that work unless your building decides to allow for roof top drop offs, and then how do you prevent theft when there could be hundreds of units?
1. There is only one per city large enough to support the system, which would only stock small, high-value, items.
2. Weather is a huge factor for aviation, don’t fly in bad weather. UPS already attaches weather alerts to their delivery notices to warn of late deliveries.
3. Permission to fly drones over private property is a general drone problem, unrelated to this specific use of the drone by Amazon.
4. If in the city, how on Earth does that work unless your building decides to allow for roof top drop offs, and then how do you prevent theft when there could be hundreds of units. It’s up to the customer to decide whether security is adequate, just as they do now. Either a building security guard or the recipient would have to meet the drone where and when it lands. Perhaps Donald could build special walls for the purpose.
Drone deliver is a non starter, just search for “Drone Catcher”, so see why.
The stores will probably just be a place where you can pickup the stuff you ordered online, like Target, et al are offering. it all about stomping out the brick & morter competition.
[…] Well Amazon.com this week let slip its plan to open 300-400 bookstores in U.S. cities, sending Wall … […]
It seems the destination is the tricky part of drone delivery. What if Amazon was also working on a solution to that? Businesses could set up drone receiving as part of their shipping/handling operation. It wouldn’t take much incentive to get them to adopt, specifically if Amazon handled the whole installation and offered discounts. They could put Staples out of business overnight. Unlimited, nearly real-time office supply. Amazon could then charge other companies for the use of the “drone-pad”. This sets the precedent.
Then your high-end, hipster apartment buildings could join. I can see this as an luxury feature/selling point. Finally, later, the rest of us would slowly gain access to drone delivery.
Beyond parcels, take out food would be a huge market for drone delivery in high density areas. The vertical separation would no longer factor into the delivery. Kinda like the food wagon in The Fifth Element.
I’m more interested in Amazon’s concept of “drone.”
If they’re talking about your usual electric quadrotor, I’m *very* interested in their ideas of cargo weight and flight range. And how they intend to deal with wind. And icing. And, for that matter, maintenance.
The Cargo Cults waited for goodies to drop from the sky. Maybe they weren’t so silly…
You’re looking at this all backwards, thinking there’s a *minimum* population density required to support drone delivery. It’s the opposite. The vast majority of the cost in delivering packages across the US (and to an even greater degree, internationally) is in the “last mile” delivery.
If you could make a deal with USPS, UPS, or FedEx, to only ship packages to urban population centers you’d be paying pennies on the dollar compared to what it costs to ship to an arbitrary destination; the cost is aggregated for shipping “anywhere”. And there are companies that do, indeed, make deals like that. Not necessarily shipping to urban-only destinations, but along a variety of other axes: Ship only on weekdays, ship only locally, ship slow, etc…
Drones could spackle in the gap between shipping to population centers and shipping that last mile. The question of population density is irrelevant if the marginal cost of shipping to a location (the MARGINAL cost – Not from, say, NYC to Dillon Beach in Marin County, but rather from San Francisco to Dillon Beach, because the cost of shipping from NYC to SF is pennies,) rises as the population density drops.
Isn’t that the point of the drones…to lower the cost of the last mile. But drones would be a high cost way of delivering to the last mile unless the drones could be kept busy, sharing overhead costs, hence the need for high population centers. (No pun intended.)
Won’t self-driving delivery trucks be much more practical and useful than flying drones?
Yes.
No, you still need the driver to make the actual deliveries. If you force the recipients to be responsible for that, then the problem is that the truck carries lots of packages to make it fuel efficient, requiring a fleet of humans to bring all packages to their final destinations, without mistakes or thefts along the way. The drone is designed for single-package delivery.
You could easily have the recipient send a txt message when he was available to take delivery, & have him get another txt when the Uber was outside.
It would essentially be an Amazon locker that went to several residences upon request.
I think it’s farfetched to imagine that a drone can deliver anything for the near future. Crazy liability issues.
Re: “You could easily have the recipient send a txt message when he was available to take delivery, & have him get another txt when the Uber was outside.” Sure glad no service is doing that now, I’d have to start “shopping” again like in the 90s. Every delivery would be the equivalent of calling a cab.
Stop playing dumb.
For those customers who wanted it, delivery on demand would be fantastic.
You will be dead before you open your door to find a drone dropping a package on your doorstep.
For me, unsupervised delivery is more important than “on demand”. Let it show up reliably whenever they say it will, even a week after ordering, leave it somewhere I’ll find it at my convenience, which should not require an appointment. I’m almost never willing to pay for fast delivery if it costs extra. Sorry it I wasn’t clear about my own priorities. If Amazon can accomplish that with drones, it’s up to them.
I’d like to know where you live that merchandise can be left outside unattended for a week.
That’s a week after ordering. In other words, the speed of delivery, whether a day, week, or month, is not important if it costs much more than a slow delivery. I’d just like to have a tracking number so I’ll know which day to expect it. Carriers like UPS, FedEx, and Amazon provide a delivery options so you can tell them where to leave packages when there’s no answer to the door bell. I think of drones as primarily of benefit to Amazon, not me.
Why would they need a drone to deliver a week or a month after you ordered? Speed is a key reason for drone delivery. If you can wait a month, they should send it parcel post and you can find it in your mailbox.
And not caring about when you get your merchandise puts you in the minority of Amazon shoppers. Prime gives me (and millions like me) free two day delivery, and Amazon is constantly offering to upsell me to same day delivery for four bucks more.
I pay for prime to get free delivery, since I order nearly everything I need online, so it’s a cost savings. For me price comparison shopping online among various sources includes tax and delivery. We don’t need drones for overnight delivery since we already have that, we may for same day delivery, for those who want it. Perhaps Amazon can make overnight cheaper with drones, since they will eliminate the other carriers. It has to be an emergency for me to pay for fast delivery.
Self driving delivery trucks *and* autonomous drones working toghether would much more useful.
Aircraft carriers are much for flexible than fixed airbases. Each truck could have a fleet of drones which could fly the last mile. Autonomous drones should be able to return to a moving truck and recharge their batteries while they are waiting to get within range of their next delivery.
If drones are fully autonomus Bob’s fixed drone base idea doesn’t make sense.
Amazon are going to use these for 24hr pickup locations to cut down on last mile shipping, as well as an edge warehouse and order consolidation point.
The fact that they use the extra space to put books in the front and sell a few of them is largely irrelevent, so long as they cover the costs of the sales desk.