Care to bet on that? Unless you can store them in a thermally stable environment with no exposure to light, humidity or oxygen there what you just said is demonstrably not true.
Kid: "Hey mom! Look at this! This Himalaya salt has a 'best consume before 2022' date! It must be really good!"
Translation: Doctors get a kickback from prescribing a vitamin. Clueless patients fill the prescription and send it to their insurance. Everybody loses except doctors and drug companies.
Here is a less cynical and probably more accurate version
Over The Counter vitamins are an almost completely unregulated market (congress specifically forbade the FDA from regulating vitamins) and it's been demonstrated that major retailers are selling fakes. So if you are a doctor and it's important to ensure a patient get the proper dosage of that vitamin, what other options do you have?
Translation: FDA approved vitamins that other vitamin manufacturers either cant get approval for or have to spend a fortune to get.
The FDA is forbidden from regulating vitamins. The only power the FDA has is to limit the sale of a product it finds to be unsafe.
That's not true in a lot of cases. The active ingredients are supposed to be the same but the formulation is rarely identical. Different inactive ingredients, different processing techniques, etc. Most of the time these differences are inconsequential but not always.
Only if you contort and narrow the definition of ethics and capitalism to fit a very contrived view point. Capitalism is neither ethical or unethical. A person can be a capitalist and be very ethical or they can be unethical. Capitalism as a philosophy and an economic system is amoral. (which is different from immoral) It is the society around it and the norms of that society that determine whether an action taken is ethical or not.
it relies on competition to drive unethical practices out and leave only the best of the best.
Capitalism has nothing to do with ethical or unethical practices. Never did and never will. That's why we have regulations around capitalism to shape behavior towards ethical practices.
Apple Watch can alert you if your heart rate increases without a corresponding increase in detected activity, in what could be a valuable screening tool for atrial fibrillation or other tachydysrhythmias.
You are making my point. That is the very definition of a niche use. Awesome for those who need it but do you really think people are going to start buying watching for the incredibly unlikely chance they experience atrial fibrillation?
If you don't like wearing a watch and don't want to track your exercise, then you aren't really the target market for wearables mate.
Wrong. I'm saying the markets they are targeting are too narrow. I'm willing to wear a watch IF the watch does enough to make it worth the bother. The only time a watch makes sense with the current tech is the rare cases where a smartphone is too bulky or cumbersome which frankly isn't very often. It's just filling in a few corner cases rather than making a whole new market.
I'd love a device that: 1) tells me the time 2) shows what that beep my phone just made was about without having to get it out of my pocket 3) has a battery life that didn't suck 4) tracks my pulse and activity better than my phone can on it's own 5) doesn't look like it's been designed by a four year old
That's frankly not a very creative or useful device. Think bigger. You're imagining a better version of what already exists. I want something far grander. Augmented reality technology or personal security devices or something else that solves problems a smartphone cannot.
It's not for the tracking. An instantaneous heart rate readout is a measure of whether you are taking it too easy or about to send yourself to the hospital.
Real time measurement is tracking. And you don't genuinely need a heart rate monitor to gauge exertion unless you have some sort of medical condition. If a doctor tells you to keep a close eye on your heart rate then sure - do it. Most people demonstrably don't need that. They just need to get out and exercise and if their heart rate is high for a while they'll get tired and slow down. The human body is pretty good at self regulating that way.
I don't think that anybody wants to wear a computer.
Demonstrably untrue. People carry their smartphones everywhere which is basically wearing them. And a wearable IS a computer so I don't really think your point is self consistent.
It lets you see the time without taking out your phone (and getting distracted).
How is this helpful most of the time? I presently have 3 clocks within eyeshot even without getting my phone out of my pocket. You have to be a little OCD about the time to want to wear a watch most of the time these days. I have clocks on the walls, on my PC desktop, in my car, on my phone, and even on street signs in town. A watch to just tell time is hugely redundant.
Remember when we all used to have chest straps with a wrist watch that showed the heart rate? Back then those were $50-$70 which is what a smart watch now costs that serves as the HR monitor plus other stuff.
The only people using heart rate monitors are elite athletes and hard core fitness enthusiasts.
And a watch also serves as jewelry.
It CAN serve as jewlery but let's be honest, the current generations of smart wearables certainly don't fit that description to anyone outside of some very geeky circles. And people don't wear jewelry as a general proposition while exercising.
So unless health, exercise, and jewelry are all three against your religion, a $50 wearable seems like a pretty reasonable thing to have.
One merely has to look at the waistline of most americans to know that health and exercise are not high on their to-do list. And there are plenty of options for jewelry that don't involve carrying around a device that smartphones do better most of the time for most people.
If they weren't a relatively high-margin business, they wouldn't be wasting my shipping subscription dollars producing original video content I never asked for.
Amazon's financial statements are public record. You can verify for yourself that they have gross margins roughly comparable to Walmart or Target or Home Depot, none of which are high margin businesses. The fact that they plow their profits back into video production and other projects has nothing to do with their margins. Walmart is the canonical low margin business but if you do enough volume low margin businesses can be very profitable.
It's telling that D.H.S. cannot identify a single benefit actually resulting from airport face scans at the departure gate
As if benefit analysis was EVER a consideration for DHS or TSA... I would love to see the benefit analysis of confiscating people's nail clippers from carry on luggage.
Go and edit the addresses on your Amazon account. There are options for time of delivery.
It's certainly not an option in the address book. I've looked. I cannot specify hours of operation for a specific delivery location. The closest thing is that you can put a note in the security code field but that gets completely ignored.
Also, package tracking is much better with USPS, and they've yet to mess up a delivery.
That's kind of damning with faint praise because I find USPS tracking to be borderline useless. It typically doesn't tell you much if anything about where the package is until it is already delivered. UPS and FedEx are much better in this regard.
Wearing during exercise is one of the primary benefits. The optical heart rate monitors are now as good as the chest straps.
Only if you feel the need to track data about your exercising. Frankly unless you are an elite athlete then you really are just tracking that for grins and giggles most likely or are a hardcore fitness enthusiast. It doesn't matter how good a job they do of it if you don't need to track your heart rate.
One only has to look at the waistline of most americans to know that most of them aren't terribly concerned about their heartrates.
I don't think so for most people. You could literally give me an Apple watch and I still wouldn't wear it. It's not that I think it is a bad device. I just have absolutely no use for it and I'm not alone in that. I own a fitbit (a gift) and it never gets used. I think for most people it's not about the cost/benefit ratio. It's that the benefit = zero.
I even stopped wearing my dive watch (Citizen Promaster Aqualand (with a metal band replacing the horrible rubber one ) because it needed expensive battery replacements which cost $50 for battery change and predssure test every year.
What exactly is the purpose of a dive watch if you are not actively diving? I wouldn't wear one either but I'm puzzled why anyone would start to wear one.
If you could build even a low powered computing device that had that feature, it'd be a winner - because it would be handy having even a subset of the features a smartphone has, always available at your wrist.
I doesn't matter how little power it draws if it doesn't solve any actual problems the wearer has. Right now all wearables are basically compact sensor suites combined with a fancy pager. If you don't have a need for one or both of those things then a wearable is going to be useless to you especially in circumstances where it is practical to carry a smartphone.
The main question is why: why in the world would you want to wear your computer?
Wrong question. People basically do that already. Smartphones rarely leave people's side so for all practical purposes they are wearing it. The question is what does the wearable do for your that the smartphone you already carry does not? There are a few niche uses but none that apply to most of the population. For most people the smartphone accomplishes all the same stuff and quite a lot more. There just hasn't been a killer app for wearables yet.
Smartwatches will drive the bulk of wearables growth, but the number of people who use wearable technology will still be less than 20 percent of the population. Experts suggest wearable adoption will slow due to cost and unmet user expectations.
It's not about the cost. It's about the fact that they don't solve any problems for most of the people that might consider buying them. Until someone cracks the code on devices that actually do something that smartphones cannot they aren't going to see widespread adoption. There also is the fact that most of them cannot be used as fashion accessories outside of certain very geeky circles.
Look, I should be the ideal demographic for a wearable. I exercise, I love gadgets, I have the disposable income to buy such gadgets. But there literally are none out there that solve any real world problems for me. The Apple Watch, Fitbit, and equivalents don't do anything I actually need 99.999% of the time. (plus I don't like wearing a watch) If I don't wear it during exercise (and I typically don't) there literally is zero utility in them for me that my smartphone doesn't already provide. Wearables are basically small sensor suites, sometimes combined with what is basically a fancy pager. Not useless but definitely niche.
The problem is that Amazon's not just trying to ship the items well. They're trying to cut corners to the absolute cheapest possible.
Having been on the shippers end that it s distinction without a difference. I'm not sure people fully appreciate just how complicated that problem is. Amazon isn't a high margin business so they have a tough balancing act. They need to package well enough but not waste money over packaging. This is not an easy thing to do.
I assure you that when you hire tens of thousands of people to pack and ship random orders of stuff, not all of them are going to be the best and brightest. If you think you have a design for a packaging system that will optimize everything and that even a dumb temp employee can get right there are untold riches awaiting you. It's an incredibly difficult problem at any kind of non-trivial scale.
That 10% number is for both Type 1 and Type 2 (and presumably Type 3 included with the Type 1). Type 1 diabetes (the kind you need insulin for) amounts to about 1.25 million people, so rather less than 0.5%....
Please note that I never wrote the word "insulin" even once. So I'm not sure who you think you are responding to with your pedantry but it wasn't anything I wrote.
When you are trying to be a righteous asshole, the first step is to get your facts fucking right.
Who peed in your cereal this morning? The only thing I'm being righteous about is the stupid system we have for paying for drugs in the US and if you aren't pissed off about that there is something wrong with you.
Most diabetics dont use insulin. Full fucking stop. Dipshit.
First off before you turn into a green rage monster please notice that I DID NOT SAY INSULIN even once. You are trying to put words in my mouth I didn't say. Second, we have millions of people in the US with diabetes and that's a huge market for drugs no matter how you slice it. Well past the market size where economies of scale are realized. Any drug or treatment used by more than a million people (and insulin falls into that category fyi) should not be hugely expensive to make and can be sold for reasonable prices under a rational health care system.
Currently stats say that only less than 10 percent of people in the USA have diabetes, if that number was closer to 50% then hell yes you would be able to get all your supplies at the dollar store.
"Only 10%"? That's over 30 million people. WELL past minimum efficient scale for production and distribution. Anything that affects double digit percentages of the US population is a gigantic market for a single drug.
The reasons medications are expensive is because in the US we have a completely retarded system for buying them that gives all the power in the relationship to the drug company. They charge a lot because they can. Most countries solve this by having a single payer system so drug prices get regulated to reasonable prices. Evidently we aren't so smart in the US so we pay far more than almost anywhere else.
so peoples packages are now used for "testing"... well that lamp broke... oh well, try something new....that poor person at the end of it now has a broken lamp to deal with.
Probably more along the lines of learning from their mistakes. I've done a lot of shipping. I used to own a company that shipped tens of thousands of custom boxed packages a year. We had a good crew but there were a lot of lessons we learned the hard way and effectively on our customer's dime. I can only imagine the difficulty in scaling what we did up to the scale of Amazon. Basically they are going to have shipping problems - the real question is whether they can use the information learned from the problems to make the system better and more efficient.
Think of it this way. It's a little like how doctors learn. The only way for a doctor to learn to be a doctor is to practice on real patients. And some of those patients are going to be hurt by the mistakes the new doctor makes learning to be a doctor. Yes possibly you and no there isn't a better way to do it. You cannot learn it out of a book nor can you nerf the consequences. Some of us have to get hurt or die so that a lot more people can live. For Amazon the consequences aren't so dire but the principle is the same. The only way they are going to learn about a lot of problems is to test them in the real world. And that will be the same for every other company. They'll work hard to think it through ahead of time but nobody can foresee every obstacle.
If only there was a place you could go to buy goods at your convenience precisely when needed, avoiding the shipping step... That would be amazing!
Well when they invent such a thing then I'll change my buying habits because the options now are anything but convenient. As it is I have FAR too busy a schedule to want to want to spend hours getting in my car, driving to a random location on a map, browsing through merchandise on a scavenger hunt, paying an exorbitant markup, and being unable to do something else more productive with my time.
Oh and stores still ship stuff they just use YOUR vehicle to do the shipping instead of theirs. So unless you have a store with a star trek transporter I don't know about it's still getting shipped and probably less efficiently.
This is all about Amazon reducing shipping costs, NOTHING to do with environment.
It can be about both. Anything that reduces material waste is both an economic benefit and an environmental benefit. While I'd agree that Amazon's primary motivation is almost certainly economic that doesn't mean that environmental considerations are nil. It can be a win/win in this case potentially.
I'd rather they spend some time trying to understand delivery hours. Lately Amazon has been trying to deliver packages themselves instead of using couriers like UPS or FedEx. I usually have stuff shipped to me at work because 1) it's more secure and 2) my driveway is long and un-navigable during the winter by delivery trucks (steep grade + ice). But Amazon hasn't figured out how to instruct their delivery drivers about hours of operation for businesses so they constantly try to deliver after hours. For business addresses hours of operation are a real thing and they need to figure that out sooner rather than later. Not every business is open 8am-5pm.
Slashdot Mirror
Most vitamins don'r degrade at all.
Care to bet on that? Unless you can store them in a thermally stable environment with no exposure to light, humidity or oxygen there what you just said is demonstrably not true.
Kid: "Hey mom! Look at this! This Himalaya salt has a 'best consume before 2022' date! It must be really good!"
Salt is not a vitamin.
Translation: Doctors get a kickback from prescribing a vitamin. Clueless patients fill the prescription and send it to their insurance. Everybody loses except doctors and drug companies.
Here is a less cynical and probably more accurate version
Over The Counter vitamins are an almost completely unregulated market (congress specifically forbade the FDA from regulating vitamins) and it's been demonstrated that major retailers are selling fakes. So if you are a doctor and it's important to ensure a patient get the proper dosage of that vitamin, what other options do you have?
Translation: FDA approved vitamins that other vitamin manufacturers either cant get approval for or have to spend a fortune to get.
The FDA is forbidden from regulating vitamins. The only power the FDA has is to limit the sale of a product it finds to be unsafe.
Generics are the exact same as the originals.
That's not true in a lot of cases. The active ingredients are supposed to be the same but the formulation is rarely identical. Different inactive ingredients, different processing techniques, etc. Most of the time these differences are inconsequential but not always.
Capitalism is by nature unethical.
Only if you contort and narrow the definition of ethics and capitalism to fit a very contrived view point. Capitalism is neither ethical or unethical. A person can be a capitalist and be very ethical or they can be unethical. Capitalism as a philosophy and an economic system is amoral. (which is different from immoral) It is the society around it and the norms of that society that determine whether an action taken is ethical or not.
it relies on competition to drive unethical practices out and leave only the best of the best.
Capitalism has nothing to do with ethical or unethical practices. Never did and never will. That's why we have regulations around capitalism to shape behavior towards ethical practices.
Apple Watch can alert you if your heart rate increases without a corresponding increase in detected activity, in what could be a valuable screening tool for atrial fibrillation or other tachydysrhythmias.
You are making my point. That is the very definition of a niche use. Awesome for those who need it but do you really think people are going to start buying watching for the incredibly unlikely chance they experience atrial fibrillation?
If you don't like wearing a watch and don't want to track your exercise, then you aren't really the target market for wearables mate.
Wrong. I'm saying the markets they are targeting are too narrow. I'm willing to wear a watch IF the watch does enough to make it worth the bother. The only time a watch makes sense with the current tech is the rare cases where a smartphone is too bulky or cumbersome which frankly isn't very often. It's just filling in a few corner cases rather than making a whole new market.
I'd love a device that:
1) tells me the time
2) shows what that beep my phone just made was about without having to get it out of my pocket
3) has a battery life that didn't suck
4) tracks my pulse and activity better than my phone can on it's own
5) doesn't look like it's been designed by a four year old
That's frankly not a very creative or useful device. Think bigger. You're imagining a better version of what already exists. I want something far grander. Augmented reality technology or personal security devices or something else that solves problems a smartphone cannot.
It's not for the tracking. An instantaneous heart rate readout is a measure of whether you are taking it too easy or about to send yourself to the hospital.
Real time measurement is tracking. And you don't genuinely need a heart rate monitor to gauge exertion unless you have some sort of medical condition. If a doctor tells you to keep a close eye on your heart rate then sure - do it. Most people demonstrably don't need that. They just need to get out and exercise and if their heart rate is high for a while they'll get tired and slow down. The human body is pretty good at self regulating that way.
I don't think that anybody wants to wear a computer.
Demonstrably untrue. People carry their smartphones everywhere which is basically wearing them. And a wearable IS a computer so I don't really think your point is self consistent.
It lets you see the time without taking out your phone (and getting distracted).
How is this helpful most of the time? I presently have 3 clocks within eyeshot even without getting my phone out of my pocket. You have to be a little OCD about the time to want to wear a watch most of the time these days. I have clocks on the walls, on my PC desktop, in my car, on my phone, and even on street signs in town. A watch to just tell time is hugely redundant.
Remember when we all used to have chest straps with a wrist watch that showed the heart rate? Back then those were $50-$70 which is what a smart watch now costs that serves as the HR monitor plus other stuff.
The only people using heart rate monitors are elite athletes and hard core fitness enthusiasts.
And a watch also serves as jewelry.
It CAN serve as jewlery but let's be honest, the current generations of smart wearables certainly don't fit that description to anyone outside of some very geeky circles. And people don't wear jewelry as a general proposition while exercising.
So unless health, exercise, and jewelry are all three against your religion, a $50 wearable seems like a pretty reasonable thing to have.
One merely has to look at the waistline of most americans to know that health and exercise are not high on their to-do list. And there are plenty of options for jewelry that don't involve carrying around a device that smartphones do better most of the time for most people.
If they weren't a relatively high-margin business, they wouldn't be wasting my shipping subscription dollars producing original video content I never asked for.
Amazon's financial statements are public record. You can verify for yourself that they have gross margins roughly comparable to Walmart or Target or Home Depot, none of which are high margin businesses. The fact that they plow their profits back into video production and other projects has nothing to do with their margins. Walmart is the canonical low margin business but if you do enough volume low margin businesses can be very profitable.
It's telling that D.H.S. cannot identify a single benefit actually resulting from airport face scans at the departure gate
As if benefit analysis was EVER a consideration for DHS or TSA... I would love to see the benefit analysis of confiscating people's nail clippers from carry on luggage.
Go and edit the addresses on your Amazon account. There are options for time of delivery.
It's certainly not an option in the address book. I've looked. I cannot specify hours of operation for a specific delivery location. The closest thing is that you can put a note in the security code field but that gets completely ignored.
Also, package tracking is much better with USPS, and they've yet to mess up a delivery.
That's kind of damning with faint praise because I find USPS tracking to be borderline useless. It typically doesn't tell you much if anything about where the package is until it is already delivered. UPS and FedEx are much better in this regard.
Wearing during exercise is one of the primary benefits. The optical heart rate monitors are now as good as the chest straps.
Only if you feel the need to track data about your exercising. Frankly unless you are an elite athlete then you really are just tracking that for grins and giggles most likely or are a hardcore fitness enthusiast. It doesn't matter how good a job they do of it if you don't need to track your heart rate.
One only has to look at the waistline of most americans to know that most of them aren't terribly concerned about their heartrates.
I think cost is definitely a big part of it.
I don't think so for most people. You could literally give me an Apple watch and I still wouldn't wear it. It's not that I think it is a bad device. I just have absolutely no use for it and I'm not alone in that. I own a fitbit (a gift) and it never gets used. I think for most people it's not about the cost/benefit ratio. It's that the benefit = zero.
I even stopped wearing my dive watch (Citizen Promaster Aqualand (with a metal band replacing the horrible rubber one ) because it needed expensive battery replacements which cost $50 for battery change and predssure test every year.
What exactly is the purpose of a dive watch if you are not actively diving? I wouldn't wear one either but I'm puzzled why anyone would start to wear one.
If you could build even a low powered computing device that had that feature, it'd be a winner - because it would be handy having even a subset of the features a smartphone has, always available at your wrist.
I doesn't matter how little power it draws if it doesn't solve any actual problems the wearer has. Right now all wearables are basically compact sensor suites combined with a fancy pager. If you don't have a need for one or both of those things then a wearable is going to be useless to you especially in circumstances where it is practical to carry a smartphone.
The main question is why: why in the world would you want to wear your computer?
Wrong question. People basically do that already. Smartphones rarely leave people's side so for all practical purposes they are wearing it. The question is what does the wearable do for your that the smartphone you already carry does not? There are a few niche uses but none that apply to most of the population. For most people the smartphone accomplishes all the same stuff and quite a lot more. There just hasn't been a killer app for wearables yet.
Smartwatches will drive the bulk of wearables growth, but the number of people who use wearable technology will still be less than 20 percent of the population. Experts suggest wearable adoption will slow due to cost and unmet user expectations.
It's not about the cost. It's about the fact that they don't solve any problems for most of the people that might consider buying them. Until someone cracks the code on devices that actually do something that smartphones cannot they aren't going to see widespread adoption. There also is the fact that most of them cannot be used as fashion accessories outside of certain very geeky circles.
Look, I should be the ideal demographic for a wearable. I exercise, I love gadgets, I have the disposable income to buy such gadgets. But there literally are none out there that solve any real world problems for me. The Apple Watch, Fitbit, and equivalents don't do anything I actually need 99.999% of the time. (plus I don't like wearing a watch) If I don't wear it during exercise (and I typically don't) there literally is zero utility in them for me that my smartphone doesn't already provide. Wearables are basically small sensor suites, sometimes combined with what is basically a fancy pager. Not useless but definitely niche.
The problem is that Amazon's not just trying to ship the items well. They're trying to cut corners to the absolute cheapest possible.
Having been on the shippers end that it s distinction without a difference. I'm not sure people fully appreciate just how complicated that problem is. Amazon isn't a high margin business so they have a tough balancing act. They need to package well enough but not waste money over packaging. This is not an easy thing to do.
I assure you that when you hire tens of thousands of people to pack and ship random orders of stuff, not all of them are going to be the best and brightest. If you think you have a design for a packaging system that will optimize everything and that even a dumb temp employee can get right there are untold riches awaiting you. It's an incredibly difficult problem at any kind of non-trivial scale.
That 10% number is for both Type 1 and Type 2 (and presumably Type 3 included with the Type 1). Type 1 diabetes (the kind you need insulin for) amounts to about 1.25 million people, so rather less than 0.5%....
Please note that I never wrote the word "insulin" even once. So I'm not sure who you think you are responding to with your pedantry but it wasn't anything I wrote.
When you are trying to be a righteous asshole, the first step is to get your facts fucking right.
Who peed in your cereal this morning? The only thing I'm being righteous about is the stupid system we have for paying for drugs in the US and if you aren't pissed off about that there is something wrong with you.
Most diabetics dont use insulin. Full fucking stop. Dipshit.
First off before you turn into a green rage monster please notice that I DID NOT SAY INSULIN even once. You are trying to put words in my mouth I didn't say. Second, we have millions of people in the US with diabetes and that's a huge market for drugs no matter how you slice it. Well past the market size where economies of scale are realized. Any drug or treatment used by more than a million people (and insulin falls into that category fyi) should not be hugely expensive to make and can be sold for reasonable prices under a rational health care system.
Seriously dude, try decaf.
Currently stats say that only less than 10 percent of people in the USA have diabetes, if that number was closer to 50% then hell yes you would be able to get all your supplies at the dollar store.
"Only 10%"? That's over 30 million people. WELL past minimum efficient scale for production and distribution. Anything that affects double digit percentages of the US population is a gigantic market for a single drug.
The reasons medications are expensive is because in the US we have a completely retarded system for buying them that gives all the power in the relationship to the drug company. They charge a lot because they can. Most countries solve this by having a single payer system so drug prices get regulated to reasonable prices. Evidently we aren't so smart in the US so we pay far more than almost anywhere else.
so peoples packages are now used for "testing"... well that lamp broke... oh well, try something new....that poor person at the end of it now has a broken lamp to deal with.
Probably more along the lines of learning from their mistakes. I've done a lot of shipping. I used to own a company that shipped tens of thousands of custom boxed packages a year. We had a good crew but there were a lot of lessons we learned the hard way and effectively on our customer's dime. I can only imagine the difficulty in scaling what we did up to the scale of Amazon. Basically they are going to have shipping problems - the real question is whether they can use the information learned from the problems to make the system better and more efficient.
Think of it this way. It's a little like how doctors learn. The only way for a doctor to learn to be a doctor is to practice on real patients. And some of those patients are going to be hurt by the mistakes the new doctor makes learning to be a doctor. Yes possibly you and no there isn't a better way to do it. You cannot learn it out of a book nor can you nerf the consequences. Some of us have to get hurt or die so that a lot more people can live. For Amazon the consequences aren't so dire but the principle is the same. The only way they are going to learn about a lot of problems is to test them in the real world. And that will be the same for every other company. They'll work hard to think it through ahead of time but nobody can foresee every obstacle.
If only there was a place you could go to buy goods at your convenience precisely when needed, avoiding the shipping step... That would be amazing!
Well when they invent such a thing then I'll change my buying habits because the options now are anything but convenient. As it is I have FAR too busy a schedule to want to want to spend hours getting in my car, driving to a random location on a map, browsing through merchandise on a scavenger hunt, paying an exorbitant markup, and being unable to do something else more productive with my time.
Oh and stores still ship stuff they just use YOUR vehicle to do the shipping instead of theirs. So unless you have a store with a star trek transporter I don't know about it's still getting shipped and probably less efficiently.
This is all about Amazon reducing shipping costs, NOTHING to do with environment.
It can be about both. Anything that reduces material waste is both an economic benefit and an environmental benefit. While I'd agree that Amazon's primary motivation is almost certainly economic that doesn't mean that environmental considerations are nil. It can be a win/win in this case potentially.
I'd rather they spend some time trying to understand delivery hours. Lately Amazon has been trying to deliver packages themselves instead of using couriers like UPS or FedEx. I usually have stuff shipped to me at work because 1) it's more secure and 2) my driveway is long and un-navigable during the winter by delivery trucks (steep grade + ice). But Amazon hasn't figured out how to instruct their delivery drivers about hours of operation for businesses so they constantly try to deliver after hours. For business addresses hours of operation are a real thing and they need to figure that out sooner rather than later. Not every business is open 8am-5pm.