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Amazon Angling For Same-Day Delivery Beyond Groceries
New submitter lipanitech writes with an except from an interesting look at the upcoming reality of same-day delivery for many customers within reach of the Amazon delivery supply chain: "The vision goes well beyond just groceries. Groceries are a Trojan Horse. The dirty secret of Amazon is that it really doesn't distinguish between a head of lettuce and a big screen TV. If Amazon can pull off same-day grocery delivery in NYC, it ostensibly means consumers can order anything online and receive it the same day. By logical extension, that means Jeff Bezos, the CEO of Amazon, is on the cusp of rendering every retailer on earth obsolete." While I'm happy to order dry goods like electronics online, I've always been skeptical of other people picking out my groceries. On the other hand, I must admit that (at least in its Seattle delivery area) Amazon Fresh does an impressive job of delivering decent produce.
We used "Fresh Direct" when we lived in NYC and we were usually happier with the produce than if we got it at the grimy Food Emporium. It was quite popular, so I don't think it would take long for people to get used to grocery delivery. The one hang-up: in NYC there are doormen. I'm not sure how you get groceries without a doorman unless they just leave it on your front stoop!
W..w..W - Willy Waterloo washes Warren Wiggins who is washing Waldo Woo.
I think we have to worry about the vitality of town centers as Amazon and other online merchants continue to take away their business. They've already been battered by Wal-Mart and other big box stores, but this could be the finishing blow.
*NOT* feeling sorry for merchants here, but this is a quality of life issue. Do we want the country turned into one deep suburb where everyone orders what they want from their living room couch?
All the family foods was delivered (mostly by the co-op) to the door or at least to the road side were housewifes used to to go the van and get there meat; vegetable and fisg. Of course the milkman and bread man came to the door.
There's a certain advantage to the online or delivery based grocery stores. They don't need to manage as packaged and portioned product as the traditional grocery stores.
Take meat for example.
In a traditional grocery store, there's hundreds of cuts of meat that are packaged up into individual portions sitting in a refrigerator waiting to be picked up by some consumer. There's a good chance that it won't be picked up and will eventually need to be tossed. Also, storing cut up meat isn't as efficient as say storing an entire side of beef/whole chicken/pork etc..
With the on-demand grocery, the side of beef is whole until an order is placed and then that side is cut up as per the orders that are needed. So if you need 50 steaks, you cut up exactly 50 steaks. Compared that to the traditional store in which you have to base that days sales on historical numbers and predictions rather than actual orders.
If you as a meat-dept manager guess that 100 steaks will be sold on a thursday and only 50 are sold, you're going to lose money. With the online butcher, you only cut up 50 steaks. In this case you're much more efficient as you have less product waste.
It's the same with any other type of produce, also the shipping of produce from warehouse to grocery store via truck induces more issues around bruising/spoilage/damage etc. If it's sent to your house directly from the warehouse, then that's one less organization that your product has to pass through, thereby enabling you to have a better product. I'm also sure they'd allow you to refuse product say if for example, eggs were damaged.
The problem with the online is the same one as the movie rental business started out with. The impulse buy. Grocery stores are great at this, you walk by the steak counter and decide "this looks good, i'll have steak tonight". Online didn't have this ability as you had to wait a day or two to get your steak. Netflix had this problem vs. rental stores as you couldn't just do an impulse "movie night" if they had to ship you a dvd. Now with Netflix-streaming you can have a 'movie-night' as an impulse b/c the movie is provided to you the same day.
Amazon is currently host to an enormous variety of goods, even after you eliminate everything that isn't sold directly by them. I don't understand how Amazon is going to work out the logistics so that you can host multiples of each of these goods within 12 hours driving distance of all major US cities, let alone within an even shorter travel distance of 99% of the US population? It doesn't seem to work out.
Either you're purchasing 20 of "HDTV model #123456" so that you can be well-positioned to sell one of them to the person within a few hours driving distance, and have 19 leftovers... AND/or you're sending orders-of-magniture more vehicles, sparsely loaded, with goods out for delivery as soon as the order is made. This seems pretty grossly inefficient.
The alternative is that Amazon only ever offers this same-day delivery service for an infinitesimally small fraction of the goods it sells, which doesn't seem like a particularly good business plan to add additional expectations & subsequent confusion for the consumer.
In India, you simply call the grocery store, order you list and get your stuff at home in 2 hours, no shipping/delivery charges, no tips expected. It has been so since as long as I remember. Whether it is Amazon or not doesnt matter a dang to the consumer.
Look, I don't want an Amazon monopoly of all of retail any more than the next guy, but maybe these brick-and-mortar chains deserve it. So much of the retail space has been taken over by large corporations that offer better prices than mom-and-pop stores but lack any semblance of customer service. Their employees aren't trained, and the products are exactly the same junk you find everywhere else. They just aren't a good experience.
I especially hate how they have resisted integrating with the online world. It drives me nuts when a company has both a large online presence and a brick-and-mortar presence. Even though they share the same branding and (usually) the same product selection, they function as if they are separate companies. If you have a problem and try to talk to a person at your local store, they say "we don't deal with the online stuff, they are independent from us." Well great, way to give up your ONE advantage over Amazon.
Give the customer what they want. They want the convenience of online shopping. They also want face-to-face sometimes. They blew it. Amazon's same day deliver will be close enough to bury them.
"Here Lies Philip J. Fry, named for his uncle, to carry on his spirit"
You should have packages delivered to your workplace.
which is totally what she said
This is great news (although no doubt it will be quite a while before they start delivering to those like me who live in the middle of nowhere!). The biggest problem with online retailers has been the shipping, especially with regards to PC parts. For example, a couple of months ago a PSU died. Now you would think that a power supply would be a pretty common part, but yet all the major PC retailers anywhere close to me (again, living out in the middle of nowhere, but within an hour drive I could get to a Best Buy, Office Depot, Office Max, Wal-Mart, Target, etc.) didn't have a PSU and because of that I had to order it online and wait a couple of days to use that computer again.
The same thing is true when I'm working on a project and realize that I ran out of some component (or I broke it!). It used to be that Radio Shack was really good at keeping just about any part I needed in stock, but anymore their electronics hobby section is much, much, smaller than their Cell Phones/PC section.
Taxation is legalized theft, no more, no less.
I have ordered items (non-food) on Amazon and had the option to pay ....... $3.99! ..... for "Same Day Delivery" in the Washington, DC area. I have no idea how they actually paid for the courier to drive from Virginia to Maryland, since it certainly cost more than $3.99 in gas, but I ordered at 10 AM and had the item by 5 PM.
I can order a freshly made pizza and have it within the hour! I'm not about to sit around all day waiting for my groceries to show up.
I've occasionally compared the prices Amazon charges for grocery items to what I pay locally, and the local stores, even Whole Foods, have always beaten Amazon on price. Amazon has good pricing on everything else, why not on groceries, Bezos?
No sig? Sigh...
Grocery delivery has been pretty common in the UK for a while. I used it for a couple of years. It's not same-day. You order what you want online then book a delivery slot and someone comes around within about a 90 minute window with your groceries.
The good thing about it is you can get all your groceries delivered without having to leave your home. Some of the websites are getting pretty good now - you can set up lists of things that you always order and that get added to your list automatically and so on. The main downside is what happens when they don't have what you asked for in stock. They'll substitute something else. It's up to you to check the receipt when the delivery comes and see if they've substituted anything - if you can remember what you ordered in the first place. They make some pretty bizarre substitutions. I remember ordering 5kg of potatoes. They didn't have the specific 5kg bag I asked for so they substituted a tray of four small potatoes. Um.
Slashdot - News for Nerds, Stuff that Matters, in ISO-8859-1 Has just realised that beta makes this signature redundant
Obviously someone who has no idea what they're talking about wrote this article. The entire basis on Amazon's business model is a gigantic facility in a limited number of locations to save money and just ship everything. Newegg does things to same way and only has 3 major warehouses and those are the #1 and #2 largest online retailers in the US.
Their entire business model collapses if they try to hold 5 of every TV model in 500 locations in large cities instead of 200 in three different gigantic locations. The real estate, tax, utility, labor, accounting, and inventory management expenses go through the roof and so do the prices. They're basically just Best Buy, Office Max, and Office Depot at that point where inventory is split across locations with a "best guess" mentality that never works out. Then, instead of customers coming to your one location, you have 50 drivers that have to go to the customers. That's notoriously more expensive for any business so they'd actually be higher priced than Best Buy. It's just a completely ridiculous idea that has no basis in reality.
While I'm happy to order dry goods like electronics online, I've always been skeptical of other people picking out my groceries.
For a component that isn't a direct part of the human-computer interface, I agree. But for the same reason I won't buy bananas without touching it, nor will I buy a computer keyboard without touching it. I don't want to have to buy one, pay return shipping, buy another, pay return shipping, rinse and repeat. I've already been burned once by a Bluetooth keyboard for Nexus 7 whose space bar was so short that my right thumb would consistently press the key that was to the right of space.
Yup, and carry home a week's worth of groceries on my bike for 10 miles. This isn't exactly my idea of home delivery.
For groceries you would generally arrange a time for them to come, and make sure you are home during that time. It's not like ordering from Amazon where you get stuff in a few days.
My son works for Lowes. He says that last year they became aware of the grave threat to their business model posed by Amazon. They fear greatly because they realize that at best it would take years for them to become as good as Amazon at digital marketing and fulfillment. It is a threat to nearly all retailers, not just Lowes.
Amazon will probably never deliver a sheet of plywood same day, but that is not where most of the profits come from. A bubble package with a few nuts and washers is the kind of item that is most profitable. That leaves brick and mortar retailers to survive with the less profitable items.
I'm struck by how rapidly US citizens change their tastes in retailing. First no discount stores, then discount stores, then shopping centers, then malls, then big box stores, then now. Rather than cling nostalgically to old styles of retailing, Americans seem instead to be in a hurry to abandon the old and embrace the new.
Suppose 2/3 of us resist Amazon because we don't like the idea. 1/3 of the customer base could still be a sea change and fatal to brick and mortar retailers.
Written like a true geekster. Look, shopping isn't particularly about distribution...that may indeed be what selling is about (although I doubt it), but shopping is a whole nuther animal. When I'm stuck behind my tesla 19" wonderwindow for hours, I often lunge at any excuse to get out of the home office. If that means heading to Trader Joes for some fresh ciabatta bread (squeezed by me to be sure) or a taste of that new sauce the nice lady hands me I'm winning on two levels. I'm out of the house and in control of buying and perusing. Bumping into somebody cute is icing on the cake. I can't do any of that from my desk. Certainly for many commodities online shopping has real merit, and it's possible that by chipping away at the margins Amazon may render less enlightened establishments vulnerable, but the breathless prose of the writer is more wishful thinking than anything truly predictive.
I used to use "Grocery Gateway" here in Toronto. The first few deliveries were fine, but then they started to get sloppy. The driver would dump off the boxes, then get all p*ssed off when I insisted on checking them to see that he brought all the stuff I had ordered and paid for. That took about 5 minutes of going through the boxes while the driver whined that I was making him late, but if I didn't check then I ALWAYS found out that a bunch of stuff was missing. It got so unpleasant that I finally just said screw it and went back to using my local stores here downtown. Better quality, I can shop when I want and while I pay a bit more I get to control the quality of what I purchase.
If Amazon can solve this problem and keep the quality high and the orders correct then they may have a chance, but I am not gonna hold my breath.
Well that's just great. Just another way for the NSA to profile people and label them as terrorists. Like middle-eastern food more than American? You're probably a terrorist. I'm sure the CIA will be updating their definitions soon if they haven't already. After all, owning more than 7-days of food is a terrorist activity after all.
Amazon Germany has many popular items available for same day delivery to almost all big cities in Germany. Order before 11am and they guarantee same day delivery by 6pm to 9pm for 13 euros per item for normal customers and for 5 euros per item for prime subscribers.
Jan
I order some food online from Schwan's - they deliver the food in a foam cooler with dry ice to keep it frozen. I just have them drop it off at my back door and it's there when I get home from work. It's not same-day of course, but it's frozen food so that doesn't matter much to me.
What you're describing is a legitimate concern, but it's also one that applies right now, today, Amazon or no Amazon. There's no new privacy problem being introduced here.
Amazon kills competition. Great!
People have to find new jobs.
People work for Amazon.
Man, that really sucks. . . .
The idea that grocery delivery is the same as other types of goods is a red herring.
Consumable good, (food, liquor, cigarettes, maybe light bulbs or smaller household needs, etc) are good candidates for delivery because they are usually time sensitive/perishable, and because EVERYONE needs them.
electronics, books, tools, etc are a different story. The population & population density required and the equipment required to make delivering a flat screen TV same day and making it cost effective are prohibitive except in the very largest cities. NYC, Boston, SF, Chicago,, and maybe LA/Dallas/Atlanta. Heck I would not be surprised if it was not even feasible in NY.
You would need a large warehouse, the ability to package large equipment and small, light and heavy, and especially frozen/cold storage. And be able to retrieve it, get it on the truck, and deliver it all in the same day (or even overnight). That is going to be expensive unless you have the traffic to support it. And once you go past overnight, then you have to compare the cost of maintaining the local warehouse vs just having the item delivered via fed-ex or UPS and giving free shipping.
...I sure loved (and used all the time) the service.
the fools that want to enforce local taxes on out of state Internet purchases don't understand.
Amazon and a couple other large Internet retailers, are on the virge of, and WANT TO compete locally like this.
The difference, at this point, in their costs is hovering around the difference between the local taxes and the "out of state" places they sell.
Once that difference is wiped out, there will be six or seven Amazon distribution centers in every state and they'll be doing next day or same day service on almost all purchases, and will be able to deliver 50 different types of lettuce faster than you can drive around town to purchase three. When there's a professional driver with a route to worry about transpiration, the thing coming from the next county over is nto a big deal whereas the household errand runner can't or won't go that far.
Not to mention non-perishable stuff like DVDs, books, small appliances, tools, grains and dry "grocery" goods. They won't care if a TV sits on a shelf for a month while a local retailer does. Heck, I buy a lot of grains, crackers, household cleaners, paper products, etc. on Amazon now just because I am often thinking of it when I am at work (in front of a computer) and forget when I go to get a salad from the grocery store.
The retailers crying about unfair competition have no idea what is about to hit them. The "tax the out of state purchase" push will absolutely kill a bunch of retailer types. They'll hold on for a few years while the luddites die out, but Best Buy being "Amazon's showroom" will spread to every other non convenience store / fast food type local operation or people will just learn to do their research online. (Also note, once the threshold is reached, there will be so much reviewing going on that making a decision will be easy and reliable. Going to talk to the salesweasel and finger-fuck the thing won't need to happen.
The Amazon story of delivery of books/electronics and even adult products is showing how big they've grown. That coupled with a no hassle return policy makes them more compelling than Best Buy for example that rakes you over the coals if you return something. When I go to my local Fry's electronics for example, I look at it and say that it's becoming more of an everything store mimicking Amazon but even Fry's is now getting to be a so-so retailer and most likely I'll look at Amazon first before considering buying at Fry's. That's a sad statement of how good Amazon has become and how poor local retailers are becoming which just throws more competitive advantage Amazon's way.
Now Amazon is branching into Food delivery, which awhile back there was the Pea Pod delivery service, which largely failed along the lines of what folks discussed here: Quality of what was delivered. If Amazon can tackle the quality issue and I'm sure they will I think a lot of mom and pop grocery stores in large cities in this country should worry. Like Walmart that came in a crushed small town retailing Amazon will be in a position to threaten Walmart and other large chain stores, Target, Sears, KMart, JCPenny. Walmart suddenly woke up last year and stopped selling Amazon goods in their stores because they saw the threat.
Harrison's Postulate - "For every action there is an equal and opposite criticism"
Get a car, loser.
Amazon's strength is online while the brick&mortars is physical location+customer local stock. UPS and Fedex are already local and making deliveries. All Amazon needs to do is ink deals with most national b&ms to get their inventory online and then coord with UPS/Fedex to do the local delivery of it. They can essentially co-opt the entire local merchandise and delivery setup at least in most major metros without breaking a sweat.
You pick your bigscreen tv on amazon based on price and local stock, amazon checks creates order for ups/fedex to same-day pickup and delivery from retailer to your door. Heck, you could probably work some sort of just-in-time setup with UPS/Fedex much like a cabbie system - a broadcast for a "fare" goes out and drivers pick the orders they can fulfill depending on where they are at that point in time. They know the local setup best and could probably respond in near real time with their existing deliveries.
I remember getting same-day delivery on books from Amazon UK in 2008. At the time it was only Birmingham and London areas that they did it in, but now it looks like they service more areas.
Bogtha Bogtha Bogtha
Had to stop going to a couple places. They don't bother to ask, they just upgrade your lunch special with the $2 egg roll. Just not worth it regardless if it tastes good.
Only thing worse is buying what should be a $0.50 pickle at the movie theater. More like $0.50 a bite then!
I only look human.
My mother is a halfling and my dad is an ogre, so that makes me an Ogreling
I live in the suburbs of London. I've been doing my supermarket shopping online for the past ten years. Not having to go to Tesco on a Saturday afternoon and overcome the urge to stab every fucker I see there in the face is worth every penny of the (typically) £5 delivery fee.
New York is a plausible place to do this, as it has the density of population. Might have a harder time in the 'burbs.
http://rocknerd.co.uk
I had a same-day delivery from Amazon in 1999. Admittedly this was when their UK warehouse was 4 miles from my office and when the Royal Mail delivered twice a day.
Still, nice to see they're finally catching up with their own history.
I've made use of their same-day delivery service in NYC a couple of times now. Problem is, the cutoff time is quite early in the morning, so that usually it ends up being "next day" delivery. That said, at least in my experience, it works well and is reasonably cheap, at least for Prime customers. I just recently bought a gamepad (coincidentally, it arrived this morning, after ordering it yesterday afternoon).
Anyway, that said, Google is working on a similar service: http://www.google.com/shopping/express/about/
The main difference appears to be that Google isn't using its own warehouses: it's actually sending people to stores to pick up the stuff for people. So it works with retailers, instead of competing with them.
Of course, no matter what system or who is doing it, this sort of thing is only ever going to be feasible in urban locations.
I've always been skeptical of other people picking out my groceries. On the other hand, I must admit that (at least in its Seattle delivery area) Amazon Fresh does an impressive job of delivering decent produce.
You think that happens by accident? It's done by machine vision. Fruit and vegetable processing plants have automated sorting machines on their production lines. Even peas can be individually inspected. That video is worth watching. A huge stream of peas feeds through the machine at high speed, and the peas are inspected with cameras and lasers in flight as they come off a wide, fast conveyor belt. Air jets turn on for milliseconds to knock the rejects into the reject bin, and only good peas make it to the output conveyor. A hundred humans couldn't sort peas that fast.
Here in San Francisco we have Instacart, which I guess is similar. They take the groceries directly to your door within a 1 hour window, so there's no need for doormen.
There's no -1 for "I don't get it."
Amazon kills competition. Great! .
People have to find new jobs.
Robots work for Amazon.
Man, that really sucks. . .
Amazon used to be a hand-picking operation, where computers told the people what to do. Then Amazon bought Kiva Robotics, which was already handling about 10% of online orders with their mobile robots. Those new Amazon warehouses have lots of mobile robots and very few people. "15 minutes from click to ship."
As for jobs making the robots, Kiva Systems has only 250 employees. A few robot factories, a modest number of huge automated warehouses, and maybe half of the whole retail sector disappears.
It's even fuel efficient. The biggest energy consumption in groceries is the trip by the two-ton SUV to the grocery store to move 20 pounds of products.
Not to rain on your parade, but have you read recent stories that have made it to the front page? I think they are selected by monkeys throwing feces at a screen ...
> I must admit that (at least in its Seattle delivery area) Amazon Fresh does an impressive job of delivering decent produce.
You're very funny. Several times a week when I see an order of Amazon food rotting on the front entrance of my apartment building when I leave for work, I have all of the proof I need that grocery deliveries will never work. Throwing perishables out of the back of a truck to bounce off the side of a building to leave laying in public on a sidewalk simply does not work. Delivery might work great for canned goods that can sit in the weather for days and survive people stepping on the bags like the Amazon model, but bread, meat, milk, and any other thing that must be kept cold simply cannot be delivered using the Amazon model.
The other problem is that when Amazon throws your food out of the back of the truck in the direction of your home, homeless people and thieves have learned that picking-up the remains of mess can be profitable. When I was staying in LA, I watched a pair of girls pour out hundreds of bottles of water from Amazon so that they could return the bottles for cash. Amazon Fresh's model of leaving your groceries to rot on the sidewalk like trash will never work in any state with a bottle deposit. Someone will come along and collect on the free money laying on your sidewalk.
Even if all the local stores in my barrio closed down, I've got a DSL internet connection at home, an Amazon credit card, and someone who can be waiting at home to collect the groceries when Jeff delivers the lettuce. These are things that some people who need to shop in local grocery stores don't have, and while you and I (speaking to the creator of the article) won't be put out if all the local bodegas go out of business, there are plenty of people whose lives would be affected by the loss of a grocery store. We like to think everyone is just like us, but that isn't always the case. Many of my neighbors don't have an internet connection at home, and I know this because when they need to complete something online, they do it at my house. I also know who has internet access because I'm the person everyone calls when they need to set up a router or a modem for the first time.