Internet shopping has a good historical analog. Mail order catalogs. It took a long time for things to settle down, but eventually everyone wound up with both mailorder and retail outlets.
Even the 800 pound gorilla of mailorder, Sears Roebuck, became a hybrid. It took decades before they opened their first store, but today it is mostly known as a chain of department stores.
I am sure that the same will eventually happen to Amazon. However not for a long time.
Mail order catalogs never offered the opportunity to transcend the experience at a store.
Digital experiences do theoretically offer that possibility. One example is using virtual augmented reality to see how that shoe rack will look in you're home, how does it combines with your wall and floor colors, etc.
And this "digital better than real" has already started todat. Some high quality furniture retailers or hotels(forgot which) ,use computer generated models for their catalogs, not carpentry and photography.
I agree that web sites do more than mail order did. And can do more in the future. But the fundamental similarity is there in the convenient to buy / don't get to physically interact / slow to arrive vs having to go to a specific place / get to physically interact / walk out with the item you want minutes later.
Also I remember my mother taking out a catalog, putting the picture of the thing she wanted in the place she wanted it, then standing back to better imagine how its colors would fit in. That is a valuable feature that you can't get in a store. (Things do look different in different lighting.)
1. convenient to buy - online will probably win , i think. From my personal perspective it's more convenient now for many products.
2. don't get to physically interact - most products don't need physical interaction , just visual one. And there's haptic feedback tech if needed.
3. slow to arrive - online is improving(1 day shipping, maybe better for a fee) and will be good enough for most cases.
And remember:store depend on volumes to pay the rent and keep the lights on. Once online takes enough market share from them, they'll might collapse under their own weight. Some even start to see this happening in financial statements of big retailers.
"Mail order catalogs never offered the opportunity to transcend the experience at a store."
Mail-order catalogs historically played a very important part in the life of rural Americans. You could even buy a house via mail order.
Even when it became possible to travel to a store easily, mail order catalogs still offered one thing that stores didn't: time.
You could spend hours, even days poring over your catalog, analyzing and obsessing. Every kid assembled his Christmas wish list from the Sears Christmas catalog, even urban kids.
Mixed metaphors, n=1, and the shock of the new. The interesting thing here is that Google seems competitive on item choice and offers Amazon some meaningful competition.
Agreed. This was poorly written and he compared apples and oranges. The shoe rack with thinner cutout pieces should be expected to cost more than the blocky solid MDF shoe rack.
Especially when the author could actually do an apple-to-apples comparison. The shoe organizer that cost $18 at Google (with shipping) is $16 at Amazon http://www.amazon.com/dp/B001M2D9D0
Free shipping on both products puts it at $13.24 on Google [1] and $16.17 on Amazon [2]. But yes, my post could have been much more objective and scientific.
The article does not compare apples to apples unfortunately.
The author compares buying a shoe rack on Google Shopping Express to buying on Amazon. He is impressed that a plywood laminated shoe rack sourced by Target is only $12 while a bamboo shoe rack on Amazon is $20, and makes much of imagining, zomg-like, 50% savings on his Amazon purchases over the year.
If you look at the same Amazon search results page where the author finds the bamboo rack, there is a serviceable resin rack for $13 (the author is obviously not going high-end with his plywood one). Four results down from his bamboo rack is a natural wood rack for under $16.
The real gorilla horse in the room is that the author goes on to lament $5 shipping for Google, which swamps any savings he was getting by going with inferior product. "Now, Google has to make sure its free delivery thing becomes well adopted the way Amazon Prime was, because the $4.99 delivery was a non-starter for me, and ruined the economics."
Scroll down further. The author found the same laminated shoe rack on Amazon for $16.17, and notes that having a Shopping membership (equivalent to Amazon Prime membership) removes the shipping fee. That means that a price comparison of the same product was $16.17 vs $13.24.
Personally I think fretting over three dollars on a shoerack is a bit silly, since the shoes it's holding will each be at least an order of magnitude more expensive than the rack.
If I was Amazon I'd be more worried about self-driving cars.
Self-driving cars will make natural delivery vehicles. If Google partnered with local retailers to provide check-out via wallet and delivery via automated cars, it would disrupt more than just Amazon.
Google has all of the nascent building blocks in place: Google Wallet, Google Shopping Express, Google Shopping, Google Maps with StreetView for routing, automated vehicles, and, of course, eyeballs.
I envy the teenagers of the future. They are going to have such wonderful targets of vandalism and destruction. However, it will make sad when Google adds defense mechanisms to the robots and skynet goes live.
Yes and if it gets stumped it could alert a remote operator who could take over and figure out what to do. They don't have to handle every corner case if they have an escape hatch like that.
This will open up all types of theft. Camera on the robot? No problem, that mask and spray paint will clear that problem right up. Not to mention all the kids who will definitely be pushing this over for fun....
True, but given a choice between an amazing customer experience and saving money, most people choose the latter. See: ATM, phone tree, commercial air travel.
The delivery guy that does regular drops at our office does everything from crates of server parts to flatpack envelopes. I can't imagine any sort of separation that can account for the variety of deliveries that need to be made and be small enough to fit onto city side streets.
> Self-driving cars will make natural delivery vehicles.
Are you sure about that? Self-Driving cars are currently a very limited use case. They drive, but they haven't shown to be very adept at more anomalous behavior that humans can do, such as following detour signs, following traffic officer signaling at intersections, or finding parking spots in locations where they are unlikely to be towed.
Furthermore, when you want to actually deliver something, you have to do far more than a car is even capable of, such as unlocking doors (for apartment buildings with controlled access), opening the million different types of latches for front yard fence gates, obtaining legitimate signatures from humans, determining access requirements for new locations, finding and successfully navigating staircases, escalators, and elevators, and a dozens of other tasks that are years away and not prioritized in current research.
Your first paragraph is fairly easily solved with data. When self driving cars are common, there will no doubt be police databases with information about detours and parking etc. Given that, they will do a much better job than humans trying to find and read signs.
The other parts of delivery are more of a problem. But remember at one time we thought it was necessary to have humans pump gas, operate elevators, and dispense cash. Those tasks were only partially automated, but sufficiently enough that the rest of the job was dumped onto the customer.
You are limiting your thinking to one type of solution. You also forgot the one thing that will trump all this, the human mind. A criminal mind would easily be able to rip off all the goods in a situation with driver-less cars.
That is a movie-plot threat; you're being silly. Vehicles can stream audio and video and GPS tracking data to dispatchers who would know where and how the car got broken into and could dispatch security. The cars don't need windshields and can be hardened to making breaking in more difficult. With cameras and GPS tracking in all the other cars in the area, not to mention surveillance drones and police helicopters, getting away clean is likely to be tricky.
Actually, you are being silly. You have never been in "the hood" then where cops take forever to get there. Ever been to L.A., NYC, etc.? All that stuff cost extra money to equip a vehicle. Cameras can't do much with someone that has a bandana and shades on. You think the police will actually dispatch a helicopter for a driver-less vehicle? You sound like YOU have been watching too many movies. The cost to run drones in the air would end up being astronomical. I hope you are not being serious....
You are postulating a group that is willing to hijack an unmanned truck in order to steal the goods being delivered and doesn't mind the risk of being seen because they "have a bandana and shades on". Question: What is so special about an unmanned truck given that circumstance? Wouldn't it be at least as easy for a group like that to hijack a manned truck? Why don't the same gangs pull a gun on the UPS guy and take all his stuff? That would be in some ways easier than taking stuff from an unmanned delivery van. The unmanned van can go into lockdown mode and doesn't have a driver who can be threatened to make him give up the key to the back.
The cost for any private party to send up their own monitor drones is coming down very quickly and will likely be insignificant by the time unmanned delivery vehicles are common. If one unmanned delivery car sends out a distress signal, other unmanned delivery cars in the area could release drones monitored by a local security firm to go see what's happening, follow the bad guys, and tell the cops exactly where they went.
Who said anything about hijacking a truck? This is called grab and go. You obviously have never heard of shoplifting or beer runs. This would be a crime of opportunity which happens all the time with or without surveillance. You have gone off the deep end if you think those drones are practical for security use. A 10 minute battery range is laughable.
Is THAT all you meant? That criminals would grab the delivery at the delivery location? Bah.
I'm sorry, but anybody building an unmanned delivery system will have thought of that right away and dealt with it any number of ways. For instance, consider this scenario:
You order a pizza using an app on your phone. You get a text message "the car is 5 minutes away from your address - please meet it outside. Your unlock code is 537." You go outside. You get another text message "the car is pulling up to your address now; your unlock code is 537." You see a delivery van pull up and pause in front of your address. There is a well-marked door on the right side of the vehicle. The door is locked, but there is a keypad. You enter the code 537 (or alternately just wave your phone or credit card near the reader, authenticating with RFID or bluetooth. Or insert the card you used into a card reader.) and the door opens, your pizza boxes are revealed - one or more pizzas are dispensed like a stack of money showing up from a slot at an ATM. You take your pizza(s). The door automatically closes and the vehicle drives to the next delivery location.
If you don't show up on time, the car texts you once or twice more, waits for another 5 minutes or so, but eventually gives up and goes off to make the next delivery.
If some hoodlums show up first, they don't know the code and don't have the phone/credit card that was used to make the order, because they are not you and weren't told by you to pick up the pizza from the car. They cannot open the locked door so they cannot "grab and go" without defeating the physical security of the car, which would in all likelihood be stronger than would the physical security of a MANNED delivery vehicle. They could of course mug the recipient to get the pizza, but that's no different from mugging a delivery guy now.
Pizza deliveries cannot wait 5 minutes or so. You are now talking out of your ass. That is one of the worst ideas I have ever heard and pizza companies will never do this. They can just hire people who are down on their luck to drive for them for chump change. You ever see a pizza delivery person take their time? Hell fucking no. You honestly fucking think they will spend thousands of dollars on a vehicle to equip with all this automated bullshit? The costs would be astronomical, so much fucking wasted R&D, and to top it off, this is not some Back to the Future bullshit. This is the dumbest shit I have read on HN in a long fucking time....
> Pizza deliveries cannot wait 5 minutes or so. [...] You ever see a pizza delivery person take their time? Hell fucking no.
Before they move on, existing pizza delivery drivers delivering to an apartment have to: park the car, walk to the door, get buzzed in, wait for an elevator or climb the stairs, walk down the hall to find the right apartment, knock on the door, wait for someone to come to the door, drop off the pizza, walk back to the elevator/stairs, go back down to the ground floor, go back out to the street, get back in the car. In short, current pizza deliveries today often spend more than 5 minutes at each site just making a normal delivery. So yes, an automated truck that just stops at the curb at street level and expects the customer to pick up their pizza can afford to wait several minutes and still be ahead on time compared to the old system.
> You honestly fucking think they will spend thousands of dollars on a vehicle to equip with all this automated bullshit? The costs would be astronomical
Automated driverless delivery vehicles will ultimately cost less than vehicles that have drivers. You don't have to waste space on the driver area so the vehicle can be smaller and lighter or carry more cargo per unit size. They can skimp on safety equipment too - no need for seat belts and airbags or even an internal dash display. Fewer parts = more reliable. There's also the difficulty of hiring reliable people who can work exactly the shifts you need and the cost of paying them. It might be cheaper to hire people now but that won't always be the case.
So I do expect future companies that need to deliver stuff will want to buy or rent the use of a standard off-the-shelf driverless vehicle, possibly adding standardized accessories like a selective-opening side door. I don't expect they will make one themselves. They'll buy the finished version from some other company that specializes in making them. That way the R&D expense is spread across millions of customers and thousands of firms, not just one.
>This is the dumbest shit I have read on HN in a long fucking time....
You seem very angry. Is there something else upsetting you that you want to talk about?
Very good observations. I wonder, though, if self-driving can work for moving items from a warehouse to "close enough" such that some smaller local service can carry it that last mile.
Self-driving cars could free up delivery drivers to do other things, such as sorting packages for the next drop-off location. I can't how many times I've seen a FedEx/UPS driver parked and trying to sort through boxes for a particular stop.
If Google partnered with local retailers to provide check-out via wallet and delivery via automated cars, it would disrupt more than just Amazon.
That's still hugely inefficient, though. The optimal solution is what Amazon does for most things- a giant, central warehouse with stuff that you deliver.
Same-day delivery is the next big battle in the eCommerce space, but the real challenge isn't on the delivery end. It's on the logistics and supply chain end. Amazon has been investing heavily in distribution centers, inventory management, and fulfillment. (And even Amazon has a largely expensive, small, and inefficient distribution network as compared to, say, Walmart's).
As seamless as the front-ends of eCommerce have become, it's easy to forget how much brute force is still required on the operations side of the business.
Automated cars can make deliveries pretty easily, but they can't move merchandise in quantity between locations. The latter is the bigger barrier to scaling the system.
Of course they can move merchandise in quantity between locations. Faster, safer and cheaper than anything that currently exists. That's the whole point.
But nonetheless, a major distribution network needs to be in place before this can happen.. If you only want same day deliveries, you could do with maybe 20 centres in the USA and automated delivery vehicles, if you want 1-2 hour deliveries you have to be much closer. And that's where the battle for omnipresence will be won.
To and from where, though? That's the issue. The issue isn't the delivery vehicles; it's the inventory management. For Google, the most likely way around this problem will be as a service provider / aggregator for existing shops (similar to Amazon's affiliate program).
I'm sorry but self-driving cars will not make any type of delivery. You obviously have not thought of even the simplest type of logistical delivery method. How would the package go from point A(the delivery vehicle), to point B(point of delivery). The simplest logistical standpoint of just getting out the vehicle and bringing the package to the residence is too advanced for any robot, anytime soon. A person can hop out, drop it off, and be on his/her way before a robot even gets to the curb. A self driving car with a person inside pretty much defeats the purpose of a self-driving vehicle.
I just want to make sure I'm hearing you clearly here:
The company that has built a system that allows cars to drive themselves, with no human intervention, across entire states and through urban areas, can't figure out a way to go 20 feet from a car to someone's front door/mailbox? Really??
Is it realistic that google will be the only self driving car company or even better by a large margin than others ? There are quite a few competitors today. And i think the u.s. government will highly oppose such situation, Since such situation is a clear and extreme concentration of power, seen from miles away.
OP appears to be extrapolating his money savings incorrectly? They base their savings off of one purchase and its cost difference. There are a ton of things I buy off Amazon that are significantly cheaper than big box stores, most of them electronics / audio related.
quote from the article:
"I’d pay 20-50% more for products just to avoid the inconvenience (and corresponding delay) in going to a physical store, like Target."
I do the opposite to the author; shopping online where I can not see and/or try the product because it is cheaper. Even the big supermarket like Wallmart, in the UK (ASDA, Tesco, Sainsbury and Co.) often fail short of having the best offers in-store.
This makes it ideal for cities like NYC, where most people do not have doormen to receive packages and thus need to be home to sign for them. Being able to schedule a window for delivery would be most useful, rather than having to be home when the mailman comes.
I've been using Shopping Express for a while now, and can say that's definitely not true. Many of my deliveries have arrived while I'm at work.
When you place an order, there's a checkbox to indicate whether you want to require a signature, and a blank field for delivery instructions. It's up to you: if you don't request a signature, they'll happily leave your order wherever you ask them to.
(UPS/FedEx, on the other hand, will just leave a delivery note on my door. Depending on how risk-averse the sender and driver are feeling that day, I can sometimes leave a signature for the next delivery attempt.)
Interesting subject. I just wish the author had done a deeper study. One user, one product bought = one article written. Wow, the standard for internet writing is really low...
Anytime an article claims company X is going to own ecommerce, you can almost stop reading right there.
Did you know Microsoft was going to own ecommerce too? Yep, throughout much of the early to late 1990s, it was a common statement. Magazines ran stupid cover stories proclaiming Microsoft would dominate ecommerce.
And a modern interface (re: Google)? What does that even mean. Like how Craiglist has suffered immensely because it doesn't have a supposed modern interface? It's a laughable statement. Just another indication the writer doesn't know what he's talking about. Consumers don't care about what some designer may think is a so-called modern interface. Consumers care about an interface being simple, fast loading, easy to use, etc. Amazon does a great job at that; they've compacted millions of products down to a single search bar and a drop down nav that is very easy to use.
The extrapolation the author makes about saving $2k to $5k per year is silly in nature. Complete nonsense. It ignores whether one product is superior to the other, such that one is more expensive / cheaper. It ignores consumer demand, dictating higher or lower prices. It ignores supply of the product influencing pricing. Personally I liked the bamboo shoe shelf and would rather pay $20 for it than $12 for the other one that I didn't like. The author didn't even bother to actually compare products. The caveat at the bottom nullifies the entire point of the post.
This might be nice for one off orders of brand name items but it doesn't look to really challenge Amazon or any e-retailer that manages its own inventory. There are at least two main issues I see:
1) Selection - It’s easy to sell the popular stuff. It’s hard to sell the tail of demand. Aggregating together big box retailers can never compete on selection. People want to order things together, from the same place. Selection is crucial.
2) Supply Chain - It’s hard enough to have an effective supply chain when all the inventory is under your control. It will be nearly impossible to deal with N retailers supply chain systems - inventory availability, location, cross-company orders, etc and be efficient enough to make a buck.
Unless Google is willing to physically get in the game and manage some warehouses I don’t see this being much of a threat although it might provide some nice competition for next and same day orders.
If amazon's big plan is to gain a monopoly like status , which many investors think it is, this competition and price erosion is a big threat both to future amazon and it's current investors.
And hurting the stock is a good way as any to hurt a company.
When Google Shopping Express can offer two day shipping to the entire country, then I will be impressed. Why is the author comparing two different products that are not even made of the same material? I can go buy a faux leather wallet for $5, and turn around and buy a $100 quality leather wallet somewhere else. When it comes to wood, if you want cheap, you can get cheap. When you buy cabinets for your house, you do not go with the cheap particle board, you go with the solid wood. Google is great in many things, but when it comes to customer service, Amazon wins hands down any day of the week.
I'll post this here, since his site would not let anonymous posting go forward (might be a discuss issue).
>
Ouch, this is a really sad comment on Harvard these days; I'd be ashamed if a 14 year old made this qualitative vrs quantitative category mistake. (Which you since fixed, but please - it should never have been written).
Try looking into GOOGs shipping network, and compare it against AMZNs. Since we have long term data on AMZNs model (including $775 mil on a robot production facility):
1) Is GOOG outsourcing or doing this internally?
1a) If not, who are they using?
1b) If they are, where is the spend in their yearly budget reports? (Not seeing it)
2) Can they match the coverage that AMZN has?
3) Can they match the volume that AMZN has?
4) Can they hope to catch up before AMZN makes the robot jump it's planning?
And so on.
You're almost an adult - try to analyze the world a little closer, you're allegedly the elite of America.
Is HN really this naive? This is terrible, if this was from an Oxford or Cambridge student - well, sorry, I'd hope they couldn't produce this level of immature nonsense.
And yes, I suspect you'll "down vote" - but sometimes a short sharp slap should be required.
Oh, and the heavy use of trackers is both intrusive and unnecessary for a private site. You're not providing any service, barring selling yourself, which should again make you pause at the "whys" of using the trackers you are.
77 comments
[ 2.7 ms ] story [ 151 ms ] threadInternet shopping has a good historical analog. Mail order catalogs. It took a long time for things to settle down, but eventually everyone wound up with both mailorder and retail outlets.
Even the 800 pound gorilla of mailorder, Sears Roebuck, became a hybrid. It took decades before they opened their first store, but today it is mostly known as a chain of department stores.
I am sure that the same will eventually happen to Amazon. However not for a long time.
Digital experiences do theoretically offer that possibility. One example is using virtual augmented reality to see how that shoe rack will look in you're home, how does it combines with your wall and floor colors, etc.
And this "digital better than real" has already started todat. Some high quality furniture retailers or hotels(forgot which) ,use computer generated models for their catalogs, not carpentry and photography.
Also I remember my mother taking out a catalog, putting the picture of the thing she wanted in the place she wanted it, then standing back to better imagine how its colors would fit in. That is a valuable feature that you can't get in a store. (Things do look different in different lighting.)
2. don't get to physically interact - most products don't need physical interaction , just visual one. And there's haptic feedback tech if needed.
3. slow to arrive - online is improving(1 day shipping, maybe better for a fee) and will be good enough for most cases.
And remember:store depend on volumes to pay the rent and keep the lights on. Once online takes enough market share from them, they'll might collapse under their own weight. Some even start to see this happening in financial statements of big retailers.
Mail-order catalogs historically played a very important part in the life of rural Americans. You could even buy a house via mail order.
Even when it became possible to travel to a store easily, mail order catalogs still offered one thing that stores didn't: time.
You could spend hours, even days poring over your catalog, analyzing and obsessing. Every kid assembled his Christmas wish list from the Sears Christmas catalog, even urban kids.
Sheesh. Not that Google's tool doesn't have merit, it might.. but we'll have to wait for someone to write an article worth reading. This is silly.
Uninformative blog post, OP.
That being said, most of the time when comparing amazon to local retailers, I notice the price is almost identical, except for tax.
[1] Google https://www.dropbox.com/s/vbnpel7w2mscpv2/google_express_pro... [2] Amazon https://www.dropbox.com/s/gh0rcveo1sqtmgw/amazon_prime_produ...
The author compares buying a shoe rack on Google Shopping Express to buying on Amazon. He is impressed that a plywood laminated shoe rack sourced by Target is only $12 while a bamboo shoe rack on Amazon is $20, and makes much of imagining, zomg-like, 50% savings on his Amazon purchases over the year.
If you look at the same Amazon search results page where the author finds the bamboo rack, there is a serviceable resin rack for $13 (the author is obviously not going high-end with his plywood one). Four results down from his bamboo rack is a natural wood rack for under $16.
The real gorilla horse in the room is that the author goes on to lament $5 shipping for Google, which swamps any savings he was getting by going with inferior product. "Now, Google has to make sure its free delivery thing becomes well adopted the way Amazon Prime was, because the $4.99 delivery was a non-starter for me, and ruined the economics."
Twist ending?
Personally I think fretting over three dollars on a shoerack is a bit silly, since the shoes it's holding will each be at least an order of magnitude more expensive than the rack.
Also relevant: http://wiki.lspace.org/mediawiki/index.php/Sam_Vimes_Theory_...
Self-driving cars will make natural delivery vehicles. If Google partnered with local retailers to provide check-out via wallet and delivery via automated cars, it would disrupt more than just Amazon.
Google has all of the nascent building blocks in place: Google Wallet, Google Shopping Express, Google Shopping, Google Maps with StreetView for routing, automated vehicles, and, of course, eyeballs.
"You have 20 seconds to comply." ;-) http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Hzlt7IbTp6M
Are you sure about that? Self-Driving cars are currently a very limited use case. They drive, but they haven't shown to be very adept at more anomalous behavior that humans can do, such as following detour signs, following traffic officer signaling at intersections, or finding parking spots in locations where they are unlikely to be towed.
Furthermore, when you want to actually deliver something, you have to do far more than a car is even capable of, such as unlocking doors (for apartment buildings with controlled access), opening the million different types of latches for front yard fence gates, obtaining legitimate signatures from humans, determining access requirements for new locations, finding and successfully navigating staircases, escalators, and elevators, and a dozens of other tasks that are years away and not prioritized in current research.
The other parts of delivery are more of a problem. But remember at one time we thought it was necessary to have humans pump gas, operate elevators, and dispense cash. Those tasks were only partially automated, but sufficiently enough that the rest of the job was dumped onto the customer.
The cost for any private party to send up their own monitor drones is coming down very quickly and will likely be insignificant by the time unmanned delivery vehicles are common. If one unmanned delivery car sends out a distress signal, other unmanned delivery cars in the area could release drones monitored by a local security firm to go see what's happening, follow the bad guys, and tell the cops exactly where they went.
The sort of drones I'm talking about might look like this: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YQIMGV5vtd4
(You can already get copters of that sort with at least a 10 minute battery range for a mere few hundred bucks.)
I'm sorry, but anybody building an unmanned delivery system will have thought of that right away and dealt with it any number of ways. For instance, consider this scenario:
You order a pizza using an app on your phone. You get a text message "the car is 5 minutes away from your address - please meet it outside. Your unlock code is 537." You go outside. You get another text message "the car is pulling up to your address now; your unlock code is 537." You see a delivery van pull up and pause in front of your address. There is a well-marked door on the right side of the vehicle. The door is locked, but there is a keypad. You enter the code 537 (or alternately just wave your phone or credit card near the reader, authenticating with RFID or bluetooth. Or insert the card you used into a card reader.) and the door opens, your pizza boxes are revealed - one or more pizzas are dispensed like a stack of money showing up from a slot at an ATM. You take your pizza(s). The door automatically closes and the vehicle drives to the next delivery location.
If you don't show up on time, the car texts you once or twice more, waits for another 5 minutes or so, but eventually gives up and goes off to make the next delivery.
If some hoodlums show up first, they don't know the code and don't have the phone/credit card that was used to make the order, because they are not you and weren't told by you to pick up the pizza from the car. They cannot open the locked door so they cannot "grab and go" without defeating the physical security of the car, which would in all likelihood be stronger than would the physical security of a MANNED delivery vehicle. They could of course mug the recipient to get the pizza, but that's no different from mugging a delivery guy now.
Before they move on, existing pizza delivery drivers delivering to an apartment have to: park the car, walk to the door, get buzzed in, wait for an elevator or climb the stairs, walk down the hall to find the right apartment, knock on the door, wait for someone to come to the door, drop off the pizza, walk back to the elevator/stairs, go back down to the ground floor, go back out to the street, get back in the car. In short, current pizza deliveries today often spend more than 5 minutes at each site just making a normal delivery. So yes, an automated truck that just stops at the curb at street level and expects the customer to pick up their pizza can afford to wait several minutes and still be ahead on time compared to the old system.
> You honestly fucking think they will spend thousands of dollars on a vehicle to equip with all this automated bullshit? The costs would be astronomical
Automated driverless delivery vehicles will ultimately cost less than vehicles that have drivers. You don't have to waste space on the driver area so the vehicle can be smaller and lighter or carry more cargo per unit size. They can skimp on safety equipment too - no need for seat belts and airbags or even an internal dash display. Fewer parts = more reliable. There's also the difficulty of hiring reliable people who can work exactly the shifts you need and the cost of paying them. It might be cheaper to hire people now but that won't always be the case.
So I do expect future companies that need to deliver stuff will want to buy or rent the use of a standard off-the-shelf driverless vehicle, possibly adding standardized accessories like a selective-opening side door. I don't expect they will make one themselves. They'll buy the finished version from some other company that specializes in making them. That way the R&D expense is spread across millions of customers and thousands of firms, not just one.
>This is the dumbest shit I have read on HN in a long fucking time....
You seem very angry. Is there something else upsetting you that you want to talk about?
That's still hugely inefficient, though. The optimal solution is what Amazon does for most things- a giant, central warehouse with stuff that you deliver.
As seamless as the front-ends of eCommerce have become, it's easy to forget how much brute force is still required on the operations side of the business.
Automated cars can make deliveries pretty easily, but they can't move merchandise in quantity between locations. The latter is the bigger barrier to scaling the system.
But nonetheless, a major distribution network needs to be in place before this can happen.. If you only want same day deliveries, you could do with maybe 20 centres in the USA and automated delivery vehicles, if you want 1-2 hour deliveries you have to be much closer. And that's where the battle for omnipresence will be won.
Automated trucks sure as hell can...
The company that has built a system that allows cars to drive themselves, with no human intervention, across entire states and through urban areas, can't figure out a way to go 20 feet from a car to someone's front door/mailbox? Really??
It's hard for me to see it unfold this way.
i stopped reading after that.
Google Shopping Express: schedule a window for delivery, during which you have to be at home.
Amazon Prime: I pick it up at my convenience from my mailbox.
When you place an order, there's a checkbox to indicate whether you want to require a signature, and a blank field for delivery instructions. It's up to you: if you don't request a signature, they'll happily leave your order wherever you ask them to.
(UPS/FedEx, on the other hand, will just leave a delivery note on my door. Depending on how risk-averse the sender and driver are feeling that day, I can sometimes leave a signature for the next delivery attempt.)
This guy is clearly an outlier and not suitable to use for judging ecommerce decisions.
Did you know Microsoft was going to own ecommerce too? Yep, throughout much of the early to late 1990s, it was a common statement. Magazines ran stupid cover stories proclaiming Microsoft would dominate ecommerce.
And a modern interface (re: Google)? What does that even mean. Like how Craiglist has suffered immensely because it doesn't have a supposed modern interface? It's a laughable statement. Just another indication the writer doesn't know what he's talking about. Consumers don't care about what some designer may think is a so-called modern interface. Consumers care about an interface being simple, fast loading, easy to use, etc. Amazon does a great job at that; they've compacted millions of products down to a single search bar and a drop down nav that is very easy to use.
The extrapolation the author makes about saving $2k to $5k per year is silly in nature. Complete nonsense. It ignores whether one product is superior to the other, such that one is more expensive / cheaper. It ignores consumer demand, dictating higher or lower prices. It ignores supply of the product influencing pricing. Personally I liked the bamboo shoe shelf and would rather pay $20 for it than $12 for the other one that I didn't like. The author didn't even bother to actually compare products. The caveat at the bottom nullifies the entire point of the post.
1) Selection - It’s easy to sell the popular stuff. It’s hard to sell the tail of demand. Aggregating together big box retailers can never compete on selection. People want to order things together, from the same place. Selection is crucial.
2) Supply Chain - It’s hard enough to have an effective supply chain when all the inventory is under your control. It will be nearly impossible to deal with N retailers supply chain systems - inventory availability, location, cross-company orders, etc and be efficient enough to make a buck.
Unless Google is willing to physically get in the game and manage some warehouses I don’t see this being much of a threat although it might provide some nice competition for next and same day orders.
And hurting the stock is a good way as any to hurt a company.
> Ouch, this is a really sad comment on Harvard these days; I'd be ashamed if a 14 year old made this qualitative vrs quantitative category mistake. (Which you since fixed, but please - it should never have been written).
Try looking into GOOGs shipping network, and compare it against AMZNs. Since we have long term data on AMZNs model (including $775 mil on a robot production facility):
1) Is GOOG outsourcing or doing this internally?
1a) If not, who are they using?
1b) If they are, where is the spend in their yearly budget reports? (Not seeing it)
2) Can they match the coverage that AMZN has?
3) Can they match the volume that AMZN has?
4) Can they hope to catch up before AMZN makes the robot jump it's planning?
And so on.
You're almost an adult - try to analyze the world a little closer, you're allegedly the elite of America.
Is HN really this naive? This is terrible, if this was from an Oxford or Cambridge student - well, sorry, I'd hope they couldn't produce this level of immature nonsense.
And yes, I suspect you'll "down vote" - but sometimes a short sharp slap should be required.
Oh, and the heavy use of trackers is both intrusive and unnecessary for a private site. You're not providing any service, barring selling yourself, which should again make you pause at the "whys" of using the trackers you are.