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Comment by alkonaut | Hacker News Reader

We don’t have amazon so I’m not used to this extreme hurry this seems to be targeting. If I order something I usually go pick it up at the shop on the corner after 48-72h. In rare cases the day after or even delivery to my door (I prefer pickup tbh). I thought same-day or next-day delivery was already widespread in e.g the US. Is this a push to shorten delivery even more? Hours?

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The goal is probably using drones for delivery where there are no roads.

My guess is the existing delivery infrastructure in most of the US is too effective to allow drones to succeed here (yet). Someday that will change, but I expect drone delivery to grow fastest where roads and other distribution infrastructure aren’t available (which may include remote areas of the US). Once the tech is proven, it’ll return to displace incumbent tech.

Amazon Prime Now (select locations only) already has delivery within a couple hours. This is about reducing costs of such services.

Are people willing to pay for it? How much? I’d probably rather go for 5% cheaper and delivery within 48h, for example. Is there a big market for “stuff, now”? I realize once you get used to it, you get used to it. I used to live in a smaller town where normal delivery was a week, now I live in a big city and can usually get 1-2 days and I can imagine how I’d feel if I had to go back to a week.

1hr delivery is $10ish, 2hr is $5ish. It depends on what you order.

Edit: To clarify, most people don't use this most of the time, because most of the time 24-48hour delivery is fine. That said, it is VERY convenient when you realize you need X today and cannot wait. Even with the shipping fee, an Amazon basics cables is often cheaper than a trip to Best Buy.

Yeah I think one of the reasons I don’t quite see the appeal is the lack of an Amazon (or equivalent). There is just no place that has everything and probably also has it cheaply. A cheap cable I’d need to chase online for an hour and then probably register at the obscure web shop where it was cheapest. It’s a hassle, but also I kind of enjoy the lack of the shopping monoculture Amazon brings.

Main use case I have is food delivery which I use quite often and i obviously want while it is still warm. A quick Google search suggests that alone is a 83 billion dollar market [0]. Granted, they'll probably need to scale this up to handle larger food orders as the Australia demo only delivered 1 burrito at a time as far as I know of.

[0]: https://www.google.com/url?sa=t&source=web&rct=j&url=https:/...

Imho, the interest is less about convenience, and more about reducing employment (fedex/amazon’s interest), combined with alphabet doing its reflexive moonshot thing. There isn’t a huge consumer demand for drones; like google glass, I expect that they will be taken aback at how negative the reaction is.

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