The efficiency and environmental impact from delivering a single $5 item in a large cardboard box, possibly multiple times a day, several days a week via gig economy couriers is disgusting. I literally cannot leave my apartment complex without driving around Amazon vans parked in the middle of the street every single day.
At a minimum, without even shipping more items, the result of gig couriers vs. fedex/ups is 2.7x the number of vehicles on the road (due to size difference).
It also gets around legal liability costs, since you can just create and destroy hundreds of gig courier corporations around the country when issues arise from "pushing the envelope" in terms of safety and policy.
Can you imagine the world we would live in if 90% of current retailers went to the Amazon ecommerce + gig courier model? Our infrastructure (primarily roads) would immediately fail.
People shopping for their own items usually don't have a deadline to get to the store and back so quickly that they deliberately endanger the lives of other people on the road by ignoring traffic laws.
people usually don't go shopping every day possibly multiple times a day. Whereas Amazon gives them the ability to order things such that a car drives up to their house and delivers stuff multiple times per day.
Quite the opposite, people usually don't actually go out shopping just for a single trivial item, they delay the purchase until some later time when they go shopping for some important item or many trivial items at once.
Splitting the same total purchases in many separate "shoppings" is the fragmentation problem that causes much more "delivery events".
I find plenty of instances of people buying 1 thing at a store so it goes both ways. Regardless, the marginal cost of adding an extra stop to an optimized delivery route is very low compared to a shopping roundtrip for a single consumer.
It's more like, instead of you and each of your neighbors driving to the store separately, you're driving to the store alone and getting groceries for yourself and all your neighbors at the same time.
That same delivery vehicle can service 100s of homes at once though, which is why it's more efficient regardless of 1-day delivery windows.
I'm sure they could do a better job of batching deliveries for a single drop off per day but I don't think that's as bad as it might seem considering the overall reduction in consumer-to-store travel.
Wouldn't it make it better? It seems far more efficient to have 1 car drive an optimal route to 500 houses delivering items than have 500 cars all drive to 1 store to pick up their items.
Beat me to it. I can't imagine how even with the boxes(many which are recycled) it is less efficient for a single route driver to replace hundreds if not more individual trips for the same result.
For me, it’s a 45 minute drive to Wally World. There’s a Safeway 25 minutes away but it’s a tourist town so everything is double priced. Many of my neighbors and I have started using HelloFresh and Amazon delivery for most things. In casual conversation we talk about how our miles driven has decreased drastically. For our community, delivery seems to be “greener” than each of us driving 90 minutes for groceries 1-2x/week.
Apartment complex with loads of items delivered each day? Makes sense, though packaging is still environmental overhead. Lots of single family homes ordering individual items distributed across suburbia? Less efficient than customer driving to the store once a week to get everything they need.
You are assuming they only go to the store once a week; and that there isn't a cost to them not having what they need when they need it. The cost can be in reduced productivity/time loss, etc or it can be in over-provisioning in which you buy extras that aren't needed (and may never be used).
It means the reorganization will optimize for less carbon usage though, which I happen to think is pretty good.
Electric vehicles might complicate things some (they still present some other negative externalities despite using less carbon); perhaps at that time we can look at other incentives or taxes.
This should be the top comment. Every time I think having a package delivered to my door would be more costly I take a minute and do the math.
Amazon operates two fulfillment centers in my city. Target has something like 30 stores.
If I get in my car and drive 3 miles to buy some aftershave, how is that more efficient than a truck with 500 individual items, distributing them from house to house, sometimes driving no more than a few hundred feet between drops?
Maybe we should make it illegal to drive to the store for anything, and have people use delivery services because of the reduced environmental impact.
When I had Amazon Prime, I would buy items more often than I do now that I have to make a trip to the store (or pay for shipping) to purchase. For me at least, it's not a one-to-one exchange of miles on the road.
The right answer is to do what many other cities across the world do, have stores close to where people live so they don't have to drive those 500 cars.
That might be the most optimal solution, but I wouldn't take it as a given. You may have less individuals getting things delivered, but then you're giving up prime real estate and causing more decentralization of population, which brings its own inefficiencies.
You might still be imagining it in terms of how it is done in the US. You can have department stores on the first floor of dense housing, so people only need to walk to the store. The real estate is essentially what would be a bar or restaurant but serves more people and gives people what they need. You're right if it means turning a block that could be housing into parking and a walmart. It's better than a walmart being a 10 minute drive away from where you live, but it's only half way to how it can be (and often is elsewhere).
This reminds me of when I needed to connect a screen 3 or 4m from the source. I needed to buy a hodge-podge of connectors and cables Because of local store stock-limitations, instead of 1 cable that did it all that I could buy online now.
Even in Europe with public transport to the stores, I would bet delivery is many times more efficient.
The only question is whether people buy so much more due to convenience that the maybe 50x efficiency gain gets offset by 50x more items ordered. But I don't think that's the case.
Would be interesting to know the numbers. It's a bit like IKEA, their furniture requires less energy to produce and ship but does the resulting cheapness cause people to buy significantly more?
I don't think I buy significantly more stuff than I otherwise would just because it's convenient from Amazon, but perhaps I do.
If I order an item from Amazon, Target, Mouser, and Walmart, they're probably going to arrive in four boxes by four different carriers under the Amazon system. If they all used USPS, they might all be delivered on the same day by one carrier.
my favorite anecdote for this was kozmo.com - one person in the office would order a pint of ice cream, it would come 30 minutes later, followed by a cascade of ice cream orders and delivery people showing up to the office.
induced demand, and somehow they didn't make it up in volume.
I really miss Kozmo. I remember showing the service to my dad and us testing it out by ordering one of the harry potter books shortly after it came out and a pint of Ben & Jerry's.
It's definitely better. Amazon's business model is inherently more sustainable than traditional brick mortar, they essentially remove a step in the value stream.
For a brick a mortar store (and this is a little oversimplified), it goes manufacturer>warehouse/distribution center>store>customer drives to store. Note too, that the last step is usually store(s) plural unless you're doing all your shopping at a place like Walmart.
For Amazon, they cut out that entire last step and replace it with a model where a multitude of people can have their needs fulfilled with efficient routes.
Amazon tries to encourage this by using a "delivery day" for all your weekly deliveries to come. They need to incentivize it a bit harder I think with free digital content. If I could rent a movie from prime (not something new but let's say original Matrix) in exchange for using the prime delivery day option then I probably would. Otherwise they are relying on people to realize that constant deliveries are a problem and then sacrifice existing conveniences they have for that problem.
Maybe that's why they don't "fix" the Amazon Logistics service. Force you to get all deliveries when you are home and you might as well pick a time slot dor that.
Amazon does have a feature where you can pick a day of the week to get all your packages. I don't believe people really use it though, because what's the incentive to wait longer?
I'm fairly surprised Amazon doesn't incentivize its use outside of that use case, though. It's presumably cheaper for them to deliver a week's worth all at once, labor wise, and they already do $1 Kindle credits for slower shipping.
When I tried this I was hoping there was some reduction in packaging associated. At least for me, it was just all the same boxes on the same day, instead of one big box, or something reusable/returnable like Fresh.
This would be difficult to enforce, and given commerce laws I'm not sure it would even be legal. That said, you could use some form of congestion pricing for delivery vehicles, but unless those costs are somewhat punitive, any costs would probably just be pushed back into the price of Amazon Prime.
The revenue generated could be used to help pay for other transit and transportation infrastructure though, so on the whole could be quite positive.
Same-day-delivery is kinda solved in other countries - read more on stories of Meituan[1] or JD.com[2]. Granted, the labor cost, infrastructure are different. But answer is probably not gig-economy delivery but self-serve lockboxes, robots or drones. By the way, delivery workforce use electric mopeds, not diesel vans like we do here in America.
I really wish I could pick up Amazon packages at a lockbox. I live in San Francisco, and Amazon's checkout process tells me the closest location I could pick up a package is at Berkeley's student union, across the bay, which is a good 30-40 minute drive (each way) unless I'm very lucky with bridge traffic. It's an hour using transit, including two transfers and 15 minutes of walking, which isn't really doable if I have anything but the smallest of packages to pick up.
I get that real estate is expensive in SF, but it's a little insane we can't do local pickups. It would be cool if Amazon could make an arrangement to drop packages off at USPS post offices; there's one a few blocks from me. Not as convenient as delivery to my apartment, but eliminates problems around package theft and delivery drivers unable to get into my building.
This is the physical world version of internet companies wiping their hands clean of any negative externalities they create by hiding behind Section 230.
Smaller and lighter, yes, but with drastically less carrying capacity. Your delivery van can pack over a hundred packages on a trip. Your delivery drone will probably carry one or two. So it's going to make a hundred more trips to replicate the same workload. Van might stop twenty times on the same block, drone has to return to the warehouse between each dropoff.
And engine idling is not a huge deal compared to the amount of thrust that must be expended constantly to keep a drone in the air (along with it's payload).
You'll gain a little on pathing straighter and then lose everything on upward thrust and repeat trips.
Bear in mind, the most efficient way to freight things: Trains. Trains are bigger and heavier, but they are the most efficient at moving things from one place to another.
The benefit you get from a drone potentially is package delivery in the time it takes to order a pizza, because it's automated direct shipping of one item at a time. But drones do not, in any way, offer the promise of fuel efficiency.
> Bear in mind, the most efficient way to freight things: Trains.
I think you just described the potential usefulness of drones in terms of energy used for a delivery. A drone only has to carry itself and it's package - compared to a car that has to carry it's weight, the driver's weight, the packages in the vehicle, etc.
I think it boils down to this: How many/weight of items being delivered to energy efficiency is on a curve. Sure trains are the most efficient method of transporting goods, but there's a reason a train doesn't deliver our packages to our doors. Building such an infrastructure would be insane.
That's why current delivery is tiered to the quantity/weight of the goods you're shipping.
I have a feeling drones will be more efficient for small packages, but larger ones will still be best by car.
A drone only has to carry itself and it's package, but it has to carry it in a vertical direction, and maintain that (because things in the air without thrust tend to fall back down to the ground, and that's bad). Meanwhile, a car only has to push itself in a horizontal direction around the ground.
As you say, the problem with trains isn't efficiency, it's infrastructure for last mile to our doors. However, we already have that for vans: Roads and driveways to our door are already built.
If I need a cell phone delivered to my front door, which is going to be more efficient: The van that already is delivering a larger box two doors down dropping it off, or a separate trip from the warehouse to my house from effectively, a small aircraft?
I was going to make a sarcastic comment about my 1 sq ft amazon box carrying my pair of 2 AA batteries crushing someone, but I see that heavy lifter drones can carry up to 500 lbs. I have no idea why someone is next day ordering a large fridge from amazon, but a drone could both carry it and easily kill someone with it.
>> a drone could both carry it and easily kill someone with it
Now imagine some terrorist hacking Amazon network and doing that deliberately. I can even imagine a not-so-US-friendly country, like Russia, or North Korea doing that.
Things that fly don't need to park blocking a lane of traffic.
Personally I'd like to see a truck that drives around the neighborhood like a little drone-aircraft-carrier, launching drones with packages for a short flight so that the truck doesn't have to stop. I don't think the technical challenges of that are any more complex than simple drone delivery.
Where are these drones going to land? That's a whole 'nother field of problems. Sure, driveways in suburban and rural areas, but what about in cities? Do we need helicopter pads on buildings for Amazon deliveries?
If there's one thing drone delivery is not, it's "simple". All of the work we did taming and mapping roadways and navigation has to be re-implemented for aerial flight. Every address needs to be mapped to a correct "spot" for a drone to offload it's package. Drones from competing companies need to figure out how to not collide with each other.
This is the lofty dream castle that Amazon successfully dangles in front of the public in order to distract from what's going on with the people who actually do the deliveries. "Yeah, these poor guys, but...hey look, soon we will be delivering everything by drones. DRONES! Isn't that cool?!"
Everyone with basic knowledge in physics knows that this won't work except for a very small slice of the last-mile delivery use case (light packages below a certain, very limited size), and even in that small slice it won't be cost-competitive given any currently known technology. Oh, and don't even start to think about the safety problems in densely populated areas.
Not to mention the last-foot problem of placing the package somewhere safe for the recipient. How would these drones put a package in a locked vestibule or even my covered porch?
Drones from the truck to the door would work, however. I could see the elimination of the driver walking the package to more of a drone operator to dump the package on the doorstep. Automation could queue it up so they could just put it in park and fly it... or even have remote operators picking up the package from a truck to the doorstep.
Even if that was technically possible, it sounds like just putting these last few meters into the hands of the driver who's in the car anyway (yeah, I know, level 5 self-driving tech will solve that problem in 2020 as well - another one of those dream castles in the sky...) would be waaay cheaper.
And more flexible: not everyone lives in a standard American suburb home with a garden, a veranda and doorsteps in front of it. Lots of people live in multi-tenant houses without gardens, even without doorsteps - or if there are doorsteps, they end directly on the street, so anything left there is stolen within minutes. Hypothetical drones would have to ring the bell, fly through the staircase (without chopping off anyone's head in the process), find the right flat, maybe ring again, leave the package and find back to the car.
This task gets fully automated as soon as someone is able to produce an affordable and reliable human-like robot (in terms of extremities) and outfits it with an actually working AGI. Before that happens, it's cheap labor exploitation galore, and if the government should intervene in that reckless exploitation, maybe coupled with people shifting some of their deliveries away from their doorsteps and to delivery to pick-up stations (because of incentives like that being the only free delivery option, or being the fastest one).
Too many delivery trucks up and down my street every day, mainly from amazon, is the reason I canceled prime, and order much less frequently from amazon.
I cannot overstate how annoying, this has become and absolute epidemic!
Is this an argument against Amazon Prime specifically? Or by delivery trucks, do you mean regular Fedex / UPS trucks delivering for other ecommerce companies too?
Well Amazon deliveries are particularly inconsiderate -- loud music, driving too fast, and the sheer amount.
But it really is the totality of all the trucks (and cars now too). I think it is actually very inefficient.
Anything I order on Amazon is super saver shipping. I don't waste my money on Prime, and packages come whenever they do. Sometimes it's nearly next day, sometimes it takes a week. Whenever it happens to be convenient and efficient for them to show up with it.
>…[Amazon] dictates almost every aspect of that operation, down to what drivers wear, what vans they use, what routes they follow, and how many packages they must deliver each day.
>Amazon says its role is to lend entrepreneurs a hand as they build small businesses and not to control their companies, equipment, or labor force. It said it does not make personnel decisions for them, and while it offers them the opportunity to lease vans, purchase insurance, and manage payroll through its preferred programs, they are free to use whichever vendors they choose.
That sounds alot to me like the relationship that Uber/Lyft/Instacart/etc. have with their drivers, but at the business level.
That being said, I don't think it's too unique. For example, if you take a close look at a FedEx Ground delivery van (not FedEx Express, FedEx Ground), there'll be a note that the vehicle is actually being operated by a separate company, under contract to FedEx. Comcast, AT&T, et al also use contractors for end-user work; you'll see their vehicles have some sort of company logo, but also some text like "under contract" or "installers for".
So I'm genuinely curious, especially when thinking about FedEx Ground, how is Amazon different here?
>So I'm genuinely curious, especially when thinking about FedEx Ground, how is Amazon different here?
They're an entire step down market, they run cheaper crappier trucks with cheaper and crappier drivers. This means they can offer cheaper prices but the downside is they make mistakes more and are generally less professional.
It's like the difference between the low class landscaper who shows up in a 30yo truck and lets loose half a dozen felons with week whackers in the industrial park and the high class landscaper who shows up in the kind of truck that won't make the secretary clutch her pearls with a crew who've only been arrested for misdemeanors to cut the grass outside your office.
They both do the same job. One of them does it cheaply. The other looks professional doing it and is probably more consistent and actually has something you can sue them for if they really F up. Everyone says they prefer the latter one but the former isn't lacking for business.
(Yes, I'm stereotyping here but you get the picture.)
I was an amazon fresh subscriber but switched to Safeway delivery. Prices are lower, better quality, way more choice. Amazon simply didn't have what I wanted. Also, if I order in a 4 hour block, delivery is free, (1 hour is 15 bux). so I picked 5-9pm, after work, free delivery, and I don't have to go out.
And for groceries in general, walmart delivery on items like cangoods can be a big difference. Soups can be a dollar more on amazon. Jet.com (now owned by walmart) is free shipping of you fill out a box, i find spices cheaper on jet, but can goods can be hit or miss.
Amazon is handy, but its far from cheapest on many things.
Same here, although delivery in a 4-hour block costs around $2 or so for me (I think the cost goes to zero if I order like $150 or more of stuff). But it is worth it.
I (intentionally) don't have a car, and I like buying certain staples (like toilet paper and detergent) in bulk, so having Safeway do the delivery is great. They use their recyclable plastic bags, which I can either reuse, or return to the driver (though that doesn't refund the ~¢2 bag feee); those bags are put into plastic bins (the kind you see when doing a corporate move), which are then put on a cart (my building has an elevator).
So yeah, for scheduled stuff, Safeway delivery is vastly preferable to Amazon (or even Instacart).
I absolutely despise the planet-destroying, finance-wrecking consumerism one of my faith's most important holy days has become an excuse for in my home country (USA), and increasingly my adopted country (Germany). Celebration is one thing; wretched material excess is quite another.
First, your argument is an ad hominem attack. Do you have specific issues with the details cited? If so, then make an argument against those.
Second, even if the reporters are unionized, the managers, who are the ones who greenlight stories, especially ones that involve a yearlong investigation, certainly are not.
Third, of course all logistics companies have accidents. Maybe you failed to read the article because it spent plenty of time detailing the differences between UPS and these 3PL companies.
I think UPS does a much better job than the competition. I hate most 3PL logistics companies. LaserShip comes to mind.
That said, the Teamsters Union specifically has been putting a ton of money into bad PR for Amazon.
They've directly funded staged protests at AWS Summits in NY the last few years. They are a powerful union with deep pockets and connections.
Also with the economic realities of journalism in this era, many news articles are literally PR pieces written and provided to journalists for publication. Most of this is undisclosed.
I think it's perfectly valid to call out what this article looks like and at least ask questions, as there are folks out there with more resources than I have to follow up on this. It isn't an attack, because I didn't make a statement -- I asked a question.
How long can Amazon maintain the charade? If you look at their Net Operating Profits, they are not doing so hot, and without AWS, they are a really big startup.
The competition is catching up; especially Walmart, and Target is the gold standard in omnichannel retail now. How long can Amazon's cloud business subsidize their retail ambitions?
This comes up often. Amazon profits are "small" because they reinvest into growth. It's a trillion-dollar corporation operating in multiple sectors with massive free cash flow. They're doing just fine and AWS only adds to their margin.
I was referring to net operating profits based only on their ecommerce operations. Amazon has been selling the 'reinvest' argument for decades, but it would not be solvent without AWS. In fact your link kinda agrees:
>All these investments have led to lines of businesses like AWS cloud computing and advertising that are relatively much more profitable than its e-commerce segment.
I do not claim that Amazon has negative cash flow, and I do not know why you would assume I claimed that.
The growth argument is going to get very weak eventually, because Amazon face resurgent competition at home, and regulatory hurdles & Alibaba abroad. Amazon is riding high on investor confidence, they have very little actually space for growth.
Amazon is perfectly profitable. AWS being more profitable does not make the ecommerce unprofitable. Also profit is a financial formula derived from actual operating costs and margins.
Free cash flow has nothing to do with positive or negative cash flow, it is the payment cycle of AR vs AP that gives them a very big buffer to work with. Also you can't claim that they have very little space for growth and then discount the very subsidiary that's growing fastest.
Reinvestment isn't some made up argument, the company has been taking gross profits and reinvesting into expansion for decades. It's what they do best and it's crystal clear in the financial performance. Claiming that Amazon is insolvent (do you know what that means?) except for a single subsidiary is ridiculous and seems to indicate a failure in understanding the business or accounting.
They offer $1 digital credits if you say "no rush shipping", which is equivalent to a $1 discount/item that you are willing to have shipped together with other items that they'll ship to you anyway.
I don't live in the US so I have a few questions about this. As far as I know there exists some labour laws in the US? And if so, how is it enforced? Here in Norway we have something called "Arbeidstilsynet", a labour inspection office, that travel around to companies and go through routines, salaries and HMS to make sure it's ok and all there are no severe breaches of the labour law.
Being forced to not take a bathroom break seems like it would break a lot of laws, not just labour laws.
> As far as I know there exists some labour laws in the US?
There are very few. Research how few protections a US "at will employee" has and then know that workers considered to be "contractors" have even fewer.
I'm not going to say Amazon in the UK are some paragon of virtue, but this article does seem to make it sound much, much worse in the US. While I do see plenty of delivery vans (for the likes of DPD, UPS as well), they certainly don't clog up the streets. Is it a lot worse in places like London?
I live in London (Northern Line, Zone 2) and anecdotally I don't think it's that much worse. I'm sure they're under some pressure, but Amazon or Hermes couriers never seem to drive or park unusually recklessly, at least in my area. They'll usually always pull into a side road to make deliveries if they can.
Yesterday, I saw one Amazon delivery courier walk around my neighbourhood housing estate for a whole 20 minutes looking to drop off one package. He didn't look panicked, if that says anything. Maybe it helps that London is a bit denser than the average American suburb?
That sounds very much how things are here in Bath. Amazon people don't seem excessively busy, and manage to park without killing anyone, which is relatively impressive as parking round here is a nightmate at the best of times.
I'm increasingly convinced that there's an effect of how US stories are reported and then spread that amplifies negativities, possibly to do with the size of population with a common language, it's easy to come up with enough anedotes to make something seem like a big problem. The spate of vaping related issues is a good example. The number of cases is tiny as a proportion of vapers, but sounds big when talked about in absolute numbes.
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[ 4.5 ms ] story [ 188 ms ] threadAt a minimum, without even shipping more items, the result of gig couriers vs. fedex/ups is 2.7x the number of vehicles on the road (due to size difference).
It also gets around legal liability costs, since you can just create and destroy hundreds of gig courier corporations around the country when issues arise from "pushing the envelope" in terms of safety and policy.
Can you imagine the world we would live in if 90% of current retailers went to the Amazon ecommerce + gig courier model? Our infrastructure (primarily roads) would immediately fail.
Splitting the same total purchases in many separate "shoppings" is the fragmentation problem that causes much more "delivery events".
I'm sure they could do a better job of batching deliveries for a single drop off per day but I don't think that's as bad as it might seem considering the overall reduction in consumer-to-store travel.
Apartment complex with loads of items delivered each day? Makes sense, though packaging is still environmental overhead. Lots of single family homes ordering individual items distributed across suburbia? Less efficient than customer driving to the store once a week to get everything they need.
Implement a carbon tax and watch the market reconfigure itself.
Also: let's re-legalize corner stores!
Electric vehicles might complicate things some (they still present some other negative externalities despite using less carbon); perhaps at that time we can look at other incentives or taxes.
Amazon would deliver to the trunk of their cars.
Amazon operates two fulfillment centers in my city. Target has something like 30 stores.
If I get in my car and drive 3 miles to buy some aftershave, how is that more efficient than a truck with 500 individual items, distributing them from house to house, sometimes driving no more than a few hundred feet between drops?
Maybe we should make it illegal to drive to the store for anything, and have people use delivery services because of the reduced environmental impact.
The only question is whether people buy so much more due to convenience that the maybe 50x efficiency gain gets offset by 50x more items ordered. But I don't think that's the case.
I don't think I buy significantly more stuff than I otherwise would just because it's convenient from Amazon, but perhaps I do.
Small items easily available via Amazon are much easier to hoard.
USPS has failed at taking advantage of its network effect.
Sending a few letters from Manhattan to Nome for 50 cents snuffs out the profits from a lot of Amazon packages.
induced demand, and somehow they didn't make it up in volume.
For a brick a mortar store (and this is a little oversimplified), it goes manufacturer>warehouse/distribution center>store>customer drives to store. Note too, that the last step is usually store(s) plural unless you're doing all your shopping at a place like Walmart.
For Amazon, they cut out that entire last step and replace it with a model where a multitude of people can have their needs fulfilled with efficient routes.
The revenue generated could be used to help pay for other transit and transportation infrastructure though, so on the whole could be quite positive.
[1] https://www.scmp.com/tech/apps-social/article/3025295/meitua...
[2]: https://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/jdcom-speeds-packag...
I get that real estate is expensive in SF, but it's a little insane we can't do local pickups. It would be cool if Amazon could make an arrangement to drop packages off at USPS post offices; there's one a few blocks from me. Not as convenient as delivery to my apartment, but eliminates problems around package theft and delivery drivers unable to get into my building.
Here is a search on Google Maps.
https://www.google.com/maps/search/Amazon+Lockers/@37.758045...
And engine idling is not a huge deal compared to the amount of thrust that must be expended constantly to keep a drone in the air (along with it's payload).
You'll gain a little on pathing straighter and then lose everything on upward thrust and repeat trips.
Bear in mind, the most efficient way to freight things: Trains. Trains are bigger and heavier, but they are the most efficient at moving things from one place to another.
The benefit you get from a drone potentially is package delivery in the time it takes to order a pizza, because it's automated direct shipping of one item at a time. But drones do not, in any way, offer the promise of fuel efficiency.
I think you just described the potential usefulness of drones in terms of energy used for a delivery. A drone only has to carry itself and it's package - compared to a car that has to carry it's weight, the driver's weight, the packages in the vehicle, etc.
I think it boils down to this: How many/weight of items being delivered to energy efficiency is on a curve. Sure trains are the most efficient method of transporting goods, but there's a reason a train doesn't deliver our packages to our doors. Building such an infrastructure would be insane.
That's why current delivery is tiered to the quantity/weight of the goods you're shipping.
I have a feeling drones will be more efficient for small packages, but larger ones will still be best by car.
As you say, the problem with trains isn't efficiency, it's infrastructure for last mile to our doors. However, we already have that for vans: Roads and driveways to our door are already built.
If I need a cell phone delivered to my front door, which is going to be more efficient: The van that already is delivering a larger box two doors down dropping it off, or a separate trip from the warehouse to my house from effectively, a small aircraft?
I was going to make a sarcastic comment about my 1 sq ft amazon box carrying my pair of 2 AA batteries crushing someone, but I see that heavy lifter drones can carry up to 500 lbs. I have no idea why someone is next day ordering a large fridge from amazon, but a drone could both carry it and easily kill someone with it.
Now imagine some terrorist hacking Amazon network and doing that deliberately. I can even imagine a not-so-US-friendly country, like Russia, or North Korea doing that.
Personally I'd like to see a truck that drives around the neighborhood like a little drone-aircraft-carrier, launching drones with packages for a short flight so that the truck doesn't have to stop. I don't think the technical challenges of that are any more complex than simple drone delivery.
If there's one thing drone delivery is not, it's "simple". All of the work we did taming and mapping roadways and navigation has to be re-implemented for aerial flight. Every address needs to be mapped to a correct "spot" for a drone to offload it's package. Drones from competing companies need to figure out how to not collide with each other.
Everyone with basic knowledge in physics knows that this won't work except for a very small slice of the last-mile delivery use case (light packages below a certain, very limited size), and even in that small slice it won't be cost-competitive given any currently known technology. Oh, and don't even start to think about the safety problems in densely populated areas.
But hey, DRONES!!!
And more flexible: not everyone lives in a standard American suburb home with a garden, a veranda and doorsteps in front of it. Lots of people live in multi-tenant houses without gardens, even without doorsteps - or if there are doorsteps, they end directly on the street, so anything left there is stolen within minutes. Hypothetical drones would have to ring the bell, fly through the staircase (without chopping off anyone's head in the process), find the right flat, maybe ring again, leave the package and find back to the car.
This task gets fully automated as soon as someone is able to produce an affordable and reliable human-like robot (in terms of extremities) and outfits it with an actually working AGI. Before that happens, it's cheap labor exploitation galore, and if the government should intervene in that reckless exploitation, maybe coupled with people shifting some of their deliveries away from their doorsteps and to delivery to pick-up stations (because of incentives like that being the only free delivery option, or being the fastest one).
I’d much rather drive/walk a few miles once a week than hear a fleet of drones at all hours of the day.
>Amazon says its role is to lend entrepreneurs a hand as they build small businesses and not to control their companies, equipment, or labor force. It said it does not make personnel decisions for them, and while it offers them the opportunity to lease vans, purchase insurance, and manage payroll through its preferred programs, they are free to use whichever vendors they choose.
That sounds alot to me like the relationship that Uber/Lyft/Instacart/etc. have with their drivers, but at the business level.
That being said, I don't think it's too unique. For example, if you take a close look at a FedEx Ground delivery van (not FedEx Express, FedEx Ground), there'll be a note that the vehicle is actually being operated by a separate company, under contract to FedEx. Comcast, AT&T, et al also use contractors for end-user work; you'll see their vehicles have some sort of company logo, but also some text like "under contract" or "installers for".
So I'm genuinely curious, especially when thinking about FedEx Ground, how is Amazon different here?
They're an entire step down market, they run cheaper crappier trucks with cheaper and crappier drivers. This means they can offer cheaper prices but the downside is they make mistakes more and are generally less professional.
It's like the difference between the low class landscaper who shows up in a 30yo truck and lets loose half a dozen felons with week whackers in the industrial park and the high class landscaper who shows up in the kind of truck that won't make the secretary clutch her pearls with a crew who've only been arrested for misdemeanors to cut the grass outside your office.
They both do the same job. One of them does it cheaply. The other looks professional doing it and is probably more consistent and actually has something you can sue them for if they really F up. Everyone says they prefer the latter one but the former isn't lacking for business.
(Yes, I'm stereotyping here but you get the picture.)
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20845763
And for groceries in general, walmart delivery on items like cangoods can be a big difference. Soups can be a dollar more on amazon. Jet.com (now owned by walmart) is free shipping of you fill out a box, i find spices cheaper on jet, but can goods can be hit or miss.
Amazon is handy, but its far from cheapest on many things.
I (intentionally) don't have a car, and I like buying certain staples (like toilet paper and detergent) in bulk, so having Safeway do the delivery is great. They use their recyclable plastic bags, which I can either reuse, or return to the driver (though that doesn't refund the ~¢2 bag feee); those bags are put into plastic bins (the kind you see when doing a corporate move), which are then put on a cart (my building has an elevator).
So yeah, for scheduled stuff, Safeway delivery is vastly preferable to Amazon (or even Instacart).
All logistics companies have accidents.
Edit: Oh right. https://www.nytimes.com/2019/06/18/business/media/buzzfeed-n...
Second, even if the reporters are unionized, the managers, who are the ones who greenlight stories, especially ones that involve a yearlong investigation, certainly are not.
Third, of course all logistics companies have accidents. Maybe you failed to read the article because it spent plenty of time detailing the differences between UPS and these 3PL companies.
That said, the Teamsters Union specifically has been putting a ton of money into bad PR for Amazon.
They've directly funded staged protests at AWS Summits in NY the last few years. They are a powerful union with deep pockets and connections.
Also with the economic realities of journalism in this era, many news articles are literally PR pieces written and provided to journalists for publication. Most of this is undisclosed.
I think it's perfectly valid to call out what this article looks like and at least ask questions, as there are folks out there with more resources than I have to follow up on this. It isn't an attack, because I didn't make a statement -- I asked a question.
The competition is catching up; especially Walmart, and Target is the gold standard in omnichannel retail now. How long can Amazon's cloud business subsidize their retail ambitions?
I suggest you read this for more details: https://www.vox.com/recode/2019/8/21/20826405/amazons-profit...
Amazon is only struggling if you combine being extremely short-sighted with taking an extremely shallow look at their finances.
>All these investments have led to lines of businesses like AWS cloud computing and advertising that are relatively much more profitable than its e-commerce segment.
I do not claim that Amazon has negative cash flow, and I do not know why you would assume I claimed that.
The growth argument is going to get very weak eventually, because Amazon face resurgent competition at home, and regulatory hurdles & Alibaba abroad. Amazon is riding high on investor confidence, they have very little actually space for growth.
Free cash flow has nothing to do with positive or negative cash flow, it is the payment cycle of AR vs AP that gives them a very big buffer to work with. Also you can't claim that they have very little space for growth and then discount the very subsidiary that's growing fastest.
Reinvestment isn't some made up argument, the company has been taking gross profits and reinvesting into expansion for decades. It's what they do best and it's crystal clear in the financial performance. Claiming that Amazon is insolvent (do you know what that means?) except for a single subsidiary is ridiculous and seems to indicate a failure in understanding the business or accounting.
Being forced to not take a bathroom break seems like it would break a lot of laws, not just labour laws.
There are very few. Research how few protections a US "at will employee" has and then know that workers considered to be "contractors" have even fewer.
Yesterday, I saw one Amazon delivery courier walk around my neighbourhood housing estate for a whole 20 minutes looking to drop off one package. He didn't look panicked, if that says anything. Maybe it helps that London is a bit denser than the average American suburb?
I'm increasingly convinced that there's an effect of how US stories are reported and then spread that amplifies negativities, possibly to do with the size of population with a common language, it's easy to come up with enough anedotes to make something seem like a big problem. The spate of vaping related issues is a good example. The number of cases is tiny as a proportion of vapers, but sounds big when talked about in absolute numbes.