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.

Comments

Seen this before...

[yakatz]

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.

Re:Seen this before...

[Sprouticus]

Or they have lots of deliveries and can optimize. It is not that complex.

Sure there will be times where you are the only person and they lose money on gas and driver time. And there will be times where they have 2 dozen deliveries and the gas for your piece costs $0.15

The trick is to make the delivery coverage area the right size to account for the volume of orders.

Done something like this

[DeathToBill]

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.

Re:I've been in the grocery business..

[dywolf]

something tells me you've never worked a meat department.
1: you dont just go to a side of side and cut off a steak
2: it's not held as a side. it comes in vac bags of individual muscles (ribs, chuck, tenderloin, flank, shoulder, rump, loin, etc), each of which can only be cut into a handful of "cuts", such as flank, ribeye, new york strip, sirloin, etc.
3: there's a time limit on that "side of beef" whether you cut it or not. vac bags the muscles come in may last a bit longer than the prepared steaks on display, but thats due to the higher quality packaging (and some meat departments use vac sealers), and even so doesnt extend life a whole lot. the meat is only sellable for about 21 days (numbers may be rusty...been awhile) even in a vac bag.
4: most meat counters do custom cuts (speaking of thickness) on demand, and vary the cuts on display as well by a quarter to an inch or more, to give a selection to the customer. that is, outside of Walmart which does all processing at a central plant, rather than in store.