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Amazon Is Testing Its Own Delivery Service To Rival FedEx, UPS (bloomberg.com)
Longtime package delivery companies UPS and FedEx may have some new competition from Amazon. The company is experimenting with a new delivery service of its own intended to make more products available for free two-day delivery and relieve overcrowding in its warehouses. Bloomberg reports: The service began two years ago in India, and Amazon has been slowly marketing it to U.S. merchants in preparation for a national expansion, said the people, who asked not to be identified because the U.S. pilot project is confidential. Amazon is calling the project Seller Flex, one person said. The service began on a trial basis this year in West Coast states with a broader rollout planned in 2018, the people said. Amazon will oversee pickup of packages from warehouses of third-party merchants selling goods on Amazon.com and their delivery to customers' homes, the people said -- work that is now often handled by UPS and FedEx. Amazon could still use these couriers for delivery, but the company will decide how a package is sent instead of leaving it up to the seller. Handling more deliveries itself would give Amazon greater flexibility and control over the last mile to shoppers' doorsteps, let it save money through volume discounts, and help avoid congestion in its own warehouses by keeping merchandise in the outside sellers' own facilities.
is to treat the packages they transport with a bit more respect than UPS or FedEX does.
Many times I get a package delivered and it looks like they routed it through a war zone somewhere.
All they need to do is get it to me intact and damage free and I'll happily use them instead.
We've had it here for a while. My apartment complex has notified us twice that they Amazon service not only refuses to deliver to the door like FedEx and UPS but the delivery person just dumps packages in the office without notifying anyone or getting a signature. When I first saw the white vans with the Amazon logo I couldn't help but noticed the "Enterprise" sticker on the back. I guess they rent locally instead of owning a fleet? Maybe that was just a trial. Absolutely crazy logistics.
N=1: I order a lot from Amazon Prime. About a year ago Amazon switched to Amazon Logistics, and since then a lot of the time things that were supposed to arrive in two days arrive whenever, maybe 4 days. There is no useful tracking number like FedEx or UPS, sometimes things are listed as "delivered" in my Amazon account when they are actually "out for delivery". On one occasion something was never delivered, got refunded, re-ordered, never delivered again; finally on the third go-round it was ordered and actually delivered. Amazon has got quite way to go before it catches up with UPS or FedEx.
Because we're not Jeff Bezos fart-sniffers?
They're not trying to take on FedEx/DHL/USPS in the general market, they're going for vertical integration.
Were that I say, pancakes?
Because the constitution grants Congress the power to establish a post office as an office of the state, and in 1794 the post office was permanently extended (after a initial creation and several acts extending it a year or two at a time).
Congress can kill the post office, and only congress can create a post office. (And Congress has been trying to kill the post office for a long time, but they can't do it outright as the public wouldn't stand for it, so they do shit like force them to fund pensions decades further out than anyone else, prohibit them from raising bulk mail rates, etc. Yet it lives.)
If Congress wanted to hand over the post office to Amazon, they'd have to untangle a whole maze of shit legally to have Amazon run the post office (but not outright own it). The cost would grow. And not gonna happen when Amazon can't even deliver its own packages reliably with its own delivery services.
Beyond that, Amazon would prefer to take advantage of the Post Office's lower rates with the "we hand it off the USPS, USPS delivers it" thing (FedEx and UPS do it too).
The last three Amazon purchases I've had scheduled for delivery to a home in the Sarasota FL area were sent via "AMZL_US". NONE of them were delivered on time. The tracking information was, compared to what I've come to expect from FedEx and UPS, vague and useless. For the last of the three packages I paid extra for expedited delivery, which didn't seem to matter as it didn't come when promised. I cancelled my order and did the unthinkable -- I drove two miles to Home Deport and bought it there! I am generally a total Amazonaholic for shopping but if they remain unreliable I'll have to find alternatives, and I will. That's how markets work, right?
I think Amazon has a fair way to go yet before they are big enough to be a threat to the Walmart juggernaut.
Define threat.
Amazon and Walmart Are In An All-Out Price War That Is Terrifying Big Brands
It little behooves the best of us to comment on the rest of us.