Comment by aresant | Hacker News Reader

Comment by aresant | Hacker News Reader

The author dramatically underestimates the opportunities of scale and future tech in her model.

Amazon is already:

- Installing lockers into apartment communities https://www.amazon.com/b?ie=UTF8&node=6442600011 that make deliveries dramatically more efficient.

- Predictive logistics & ordering patterns are a core Amazon discipline and they are world class at it.

- Droning looks like a gimmick today, but why should it be in the future?

Imagine a not-far-out future where: - Predictive ordering algos keep right balance of product on hand - Order comes in, robot loads it from GIANT physical warehouse that is NOT in a city center - Order is sorted into a "locker" or a "single" end point - Locker end points are put onto a locker-loading vehicle that runs a daily route that ties into the 2hr timeline. - Single points deliveries are brought by automated heavy delivery truck to city center range from which point they are either droned or courier delivered

- - -

That future ain't that far off folks.

And in the meantime Amazon, who has their shareholders trained to reinvest every dollar of profit into their scale, is going to go and corner the multi-trillion dollar grocery & last mile market.

The lockers are amazing. If you live in an apartment building, the leasing offices which sign for packages are often only open during business hours. If you live in a house, there's a good chance that someone grabs your package off your porch.

So what do you do if you need a strip of LEDs for a project that you're putting together by this weekend and you don't have the right hours open in your schedule? (Or [insert random product here]?)

Just have it show up at the supermarket/drug store/gas station in a couple of days. Easy.

It's also cool that the apartment buildings can install the lockers and use them for packages which Amazon never touches, for the whole 'business hours' problem. But as Amazon's programs for offering free shipping to 3rd-party sellers are making it more of an 'Everything Store' by the day...well, it'll definitely be interesting to see what happens.

> If you live in an apartment building, the leasing offices which sign for packages

Somewhat OT, but are these common in US (or wherever you are)? If so, out of interest, what other duties to they have?

In Finland, I've never seen such offices even in the larger apartment buildings with hundreds of dwellings.

Parcel lockers (both public and recently in apartment buildings) are a thing here as well, but they are mostly replacing pickup-from-post-office. Home delivery has always been a premium option when ordering online, not the norm. The network here is owned by Posti so any company or individual can send packages to them, or use them to send packages at cheaper rates than going to the post office.

Yes it's very common to rent from a company rather than individual landlords. Some of these companies are massive managing hundreds of thousands apartments. Many of the building are specifically built as rentals and all units are for rent hence there is often a leasing office somewhere in the building.

OK. Here such companies just have one central office per city/region, no building-specific ones. The largest companies here manage "only" tens of thousands of rental apartments, though.

How are they handling visiting the grounds/future apartments for interested renters? That's one of the main duties of the leasing office people in the US. When looking to rent one visits many such places and asks the leasing office people various questions while doing so.

Typically by making an appointment.

Scheduled public presentations, or appointments.

I think you would be hard-pressed to find an apartment complex without a leasing office. I have never seen that in the US. Mostly I think they are there to handle showing people around and finalizing leases. They also can handle maintenance disputes and forward complaints to the right people.

Also, for the sake of those outside the US:

Heavily weight the first impressions of the leasing / office staff to determine whether you WANT to live in an apartment complex: As stated above, these will be the people you will deal with for anything from clogged drains - to being unable to pay rent on time.

In short: you want to make sure they are friendly, professional and courteous -- or it may ultimately detract from the perceived quality of living in that Apartment [0].

[0] - I lived in 6 apartment complexes from time I was a broke student to young professional with a family.

Commonly apartment complexes here (Finland) are owned by building-specific limited liability housing companies that do not make profit, with shares corresponding to apartments. Those shares are then owned by various individuals or rental companies, so a building office makes less sense.

But if a rental provider company owns the complex outright, they still don't have building-specific offices, but just one central office per city/region.

That arrangement would be considered a co-op in the United States.

While such an arrangement is possible and legal everywhere something like 95% of all co-ops are in New York City.

What's the upside for the company that owns the building?

Is this the same thing as a concierge? I've seen a few apartment blocks with them in the UK, but it's rare.

Many states require an on site property manager for larger buildings. So it is normal for them to handle collecting rent, screening tenants, signing leases

It's fairly common in newer and/or larger buildings; walk-ups and buildings with a single landlord don't usually do things that way. But a lot of people moving to big cities around here are probably familiar with the idea. They also handle maintenance requests, showing people units, and sometimes things like community events.

The USPS does also have package lockers - larger boxes with keys that get left in your mailbox - but they aren't universal and companies like Fedex and UPS rarely have access to them. You can also have things held at the post office.

It's not that there are no other ways of solving the problem, it's just that the lockers are convenient and requires very little planning or forethought.

> If you live in a house, there's a good chance that someone grabs your package off your porch.

I don't know about "good chance". Small chance, perhaps. I've still never had a package stolen in 20+ years of ordering online. But many folks have packages delivered to work for this reason (and I admit I'm more likely to have expensive packages delivered to work). But the lockers solve a problem I don't really have, and suddenly make ordering online as inconvenient as buying stuff in-store.

It really depends on your area and living situation.

I have a place in suburban Minneapolis and I could (and have) left packages sitting on my doorstep for weeks while on vacation. Still there when I got back - only a single lost package over about a decade now.

I also have a place in Chicago. A package left outside at the door would be gone within hours as I live directly off a very busy street. Even if put inside, if the door gets left unlocked or ajar a bit you have a very high chance of the package disappearing. Packages get delivered to the office or not at all when I'm in town.

I agree re: having zero interest in driving to the nearest locker though - I'd just go to the store. It's possible they will reach the density in Chicago where I can walk a half block - which I'd be okay with - but I can't imagine that being cost effective for most areas of the city.

Isn’t that what Amazon’s IOT key is trying to solve?

I'm an Amazon seller and Amazon can't even keep track of products in their own fulfillment centers. They've added $10k+ worth of random inventory into my account and I can't even find someone who cares enough to fix the mistake. My support ticket is 2+ months old now. At least I'm on the better end, I know someone else with the exact opposite problem who is magically losing inventory at Amazon's fulfillment centers... Based on this, I want to say that that future is off but it's probably a different team... From the top level, figuring that out probably isn't hard even if Amazon still has far to go when it comes to execution.

From the perception of someone who's currently learning how to code to build a restocking software for Amazon sellers.

>Droning looks like a gimmick today, but why should it be in the future?

It's loud. And dangerous.

I'll be the devil's advocate here: Cars are loud and dangerous - we figured it out as a society.

We've become significantly more risk-averse as a society though. If cars were invented today, it seems extremely unlikely that the intimate mixing of pedestrian and vehicle realms would be tolerated in the way it is now. We generally only accept dangerous transportation, structures and substances if they are a legacy from an earlier age. And even then you see high pressure to reduce or eliminate them, e.g. cigarettes.

That's a fair point, but have you actually heard a drone? It's really loud. It will be incredibly hard to counteract public pressure.

I actually just bought one last weekend. Haven't flow it yet, so I suppose I'll find out very soon!

I believe you that they're crazy loud, but I think the technology will improve and we'll figure out regulation, fly zones, etc.

Of course, this is all predicated on us agreeing as a society that we want this thing integrated into our communities. This want is unclear and I think that's the meat of the point you were making which is a fair one.

They are not able to be heard (at least in a common city setting) above 100ft or so, in my experience. Maybe less.

I imagine any drone network would fly at a couple hundred feet for most of the journey, and only be a "nuisance" for the period of time it has to descend straight down to the delivery point.

We "figured it out as a society" by sacrificing 40,000 people/year on the altar of the automobile, paving huge portions of our most valuable real estate, and adding car debt as a necessity for our under-class to function in society.

Maybe we'll be smart enough next time to think through the costs of our revolutions.

No, we haven't. The more civilized among us, like the Dutch, have gotten rid of them as much as they can, and other places promote public transport too.

Also, they have the potential of being semi anonymous, captured, suffering mech failure while over people, etc.

Cars exhaust system is louder, it was fixed in the process.

Eventually, Amazon could also combine their predictive ordering with their lockers to stock common goods before they're ordered (some combination of a vending machine and a pickup locker).

There must be a lot of slop still in the system, because I had 3 separate small packages (from the same order) delivered by 3 different vehicles to my door within the span of 30 minutes (on the same day) last week. All three items would have easily fit into the smallest box that they delivered. Presumably they had enough deliveries in my neighborhood to make this worthwhile.

I would add Robot deliveries to this list as well. Yes, if these take off, things will look different.

https://www.theverge.com/2017/7/25/16024470/starship-technol...

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