Also, the US population density is ~100 people per square mile so chances are good someone within 1 mile of you also needs a package today. Sure, it's cheaper for them to drop off 10 packages at the same apartment complex, but even fairly remote areas can be surprisingly profitable.
That's exactly my point. The more people who need packages around you, the less it costs to deliver a package specifically to you. Going off the grid in remote corners sounds great, but part of the reason we moved to cities is because sharing infrastructure costs makes things more efficient.
>Also, the US population density is ~100 people per square mile so chances are good someone within 1 mile of you also needs a package today.
The US's population density is 100 people / square mile, but that doesn't tell you the full story. We don't live all over America, we are clustered into cities and towns, mostly on the coasts. There's a lot of desert and Alaskan wilderness with no one around bringing down the average. NYC alone is ~6% of the US population. The Northeast megalopolis is ~17% on ~2% of the land.
On top of that if you live in the middle of nowhere they simply don't deliver to you. So, if more people moved to the desert for whatever reason there costs stay more or less the same.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transportation_in_the_United...
Obviously there is more to package deliver than just the raw cost of getting a package from a local sorting center to the end of a rural driveway.
At the moment, a lot of the cheap rural shipping is being subsidized by the USPS.
Her "broadband" connection is a 2-6/2Mbps Wimax connection via an antenna on the roof to the nearest town a few miles away. It's still weird being able to sit out "in the middle of nowhere", talking to friends online, and order stuff I need and still have it show up the next day. Was a lifesaver when I stayed there for two weeks back in March after she had a hospital stay, and I needed a proper office chair and a folding table to act as a desk rather than using her kitchen table.
Was still able to work remotely just fine (most of my stuff was SSH to remote servers, and a web browser).
More surprising is that when I did the same thing earlier this month to help her after knee replacement surgery, that I could get T-Mobile LTE inside her house - back in March, I'd only been able to get it while sitting on the front porch.
Quite a change from a few years ago when all she could get was 21.6Kbps dialup, and I had to send her a literal pile of USR Courier modems with instructions "if you have a lightning storm and the modem won't work the next day, throw that one in the trash and plug in another from the stack."
With all due respect, that seems very decadent. Back when we lived in the sticks, the (simple) rule was to just unplug (from power as well as POTS) all electronic equipment when not in use. Never lost a modem to a thunderstorm in those days!
I couldn't depend on her to unplug everything every time there was a storm.
This is only true because they subcontract these rural deliveries to USPS [1]. Without USPS, who's already required to go there anyways to deliver traditional mail, it isn't profitable.
[1] http://www.wsj.com/articles/u-s-mail-does-the-trick-for-fede...