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Comment by SomeOldThrow | Hacker News Reader

Who wakes up saying "gosh my life would be so much better if I could just buy things faster"?

Brick and mortar stores are going out of business left and right based on the market reality that people are more than willing to wait 2 days for their items if it's cheaper and is delivered to their door.

I think it's an extremely niche market, so I think it'll only be successful if you charge out the nose for the delivery.

They're going out of business because their inventory sucks. Every recession makes them suck more as MBAs optimize for lower quality and less selection.

Well, we’re talking about food delivery here. I’d order food much more often if it arrived quickly and thus was hotter when it got here.

And with no cares or worries that the noise would bug the hell out of your neighbors?

Come on... this is an awful idea.

Now would that be my neighbors who drive a dirtbike around their property for 6 hours a day, or the neighbors who tie their dog up outside at night and let it bark constantly at 2am?

Sounds like the broken windows theory in action.

Sounds racist man.

The dirtbike around their property neighbors.

It's the people who wake up saying "gosh my life would be so much better if I could just sell things faster", they're not really looking to improve your life, just the bottom line.

You do not have kids, don't you?

I’d love to hear the connection explained.

I have kids, and this isn't a problem for me - not really sure what the children angle is here?

I live in a small rural town in Scotland, yet Amazon and others can deliver stuff to my door the next day. In big cities, some companies even offer same-day delivery.

Honestly, I don't need my stuff any quicker than that.

I'm sure there are some genuinely useful niche uses for drones - for example, there was a recent HN post about a company in Africa doing drone delivery of medical supplies to remote and inaccessible locations.

But I don't think it's a good idea to fill our skies with noisy, flying lithium batteries, just so you can get a pizza in 16 minutes instead of 18.

Do you own a blender? How often do you use it? Do you not think that the economic and environmental cost of producing that blender is too large, considering how rarely you use it? It literally sits unused 99.99% of the time. Talk about inefficiency!

If a drone service could deliver a blender in 5 minutes when you had blending to do, and take it away again when you're done, the blender could get much better utilisation by being shared with the entire town, at a lower economic and environmental cost.

The same probably applies to nearly everything in your house.

"Sharing economy but with drones" is a weird choice of hills to die on in 2019.

Good way of "disrupting" the blender/appliances market.

While you might have a point for some items, I think there are diminishing returns for most; I obviously don't have numbers, but it would seem to be highly inefficient to fly a blender around with a drone. Your 5-minute figure is also pretty unrealistic.

I could see how drone delivery might work for high value items, but they could just as easily be delivered in an EV van/truck carrying hundreds of items instead of just one. One genuinely useful case might be quickly flying blood/organs to a hospital.

There is also the human cost to consider; the noise of a single drone is very irritating, I can't imagine the horror of having our skies filled with the things.

I know of course you were generalising, but in my particular case, I actually do use my mini-blender quite often (for making curry pastes) :)

While cool in theory, I can't imagine the noise pollution and airspace traffic that would be generated by these drones.

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