You get free same day delivery. Amazon just greatly saved on last mile delivery costs.
That's the value of those nodes without having to store all the inventory.
I'm under the impression this is something they're really trying to optimize right now. Not sure if it's everywhere but where I live in Cincinnati, Amazon is now operating their own courier service for normal Prime deliveries piggybacking on top of Prime Now drivers.
When you place an order (on regular Amazon.com) you don't necessarily know whether it will come from UPS, FedEx, an Amazon courier, etc. The Amazon couriers don't seem to know that it's not a Prime Now order and that the delivery time isn't known in advance to the customer like it is with Prime Now, as they show up midday and call you (from an unknown number) anticipating you'd be at home and asking you to let them in the gate.
One unexpected problem that emerges here is that the standard delivery service courier for a route is regular and that one person can be given a gate key; much harder to solve that with dozens or hundreds of couriers.
Not for me either, but not everyone wants or can have groceries and/or packages sitting on their porch all day.
I haven't used it yet, but I just went to their website. I picked the store that I pass on my way home from work. Next available pickup is tomorrow at noon. They gotta go same day if they want people to use it. That or it's popular at this particular store, who knows.
We got a Market Basket in Maine I think 2 years ago - in Biddeford. No joke, you'd think it were Six Flags with the traffic it gets on the weekends.
- Local supermarket (pickup and delivery)
- Amazon Fresh
- Services like BlueApron
BlueApron is a WAY better value, IMO. This is where I see the future being. It's fun, healthy (very), promotes sustainability, is fairly cost-effective (once you consider they deliver it as part of the cost) and is worry-free.
Shopping on Amazon still means I have to shop. Might as well take 5-10 minutes and go to the store :)
I personally also strongly dislike going to the Whole Foods stores in my area.
[1] Plausible scenario based on dozens of comments on HN
If this works out for Amazon, I wouldn't be surprised to see Walmart try and buy Trader Joe's. They own Aldi, which has made a big push to compete with Walmart's reach outside cities. The nearest Aldi is closer than Walmart, and that's already not far away.
The line dividing Germany into Aldi Nord and Aldi Süd territory — https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/f/fc/Aldi_equ... — is called the "Aldi equator". We sometimes jokingly call it Germany's most important dividing line post-reunification :)
tl;dr Aldi and Trader Joe's are (theoretically) in competition, and neither owns the other. The other Aldi owns Trader Joe's.
The two Aldi locations I drive past are both located less than a mile from the nearest Walmart locations (I expect they do a fair amount of piggybacking).
The purchase doesn't make a huge amount of sense to me. I guess the most sensible thing is that they see the stores being located by the best populations to start out doing food deliveries for (affluent, so they can charge higher prices while they figure out how to do it).
Walmart has a pickup service. They keep experimenting with rapid delivery but people don't really want to pay much for it.
1. http://www.chainstoreage.com/article/different-kind-drone-ro...
This deal was more about corporate politics and shareholder drama than anything else.