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Comment by AgloeDreams | Hacker News Reader

    Amazon is going to vertically integrate shipping, no question. The market demands it, and Amazon will probably eventually ship more packages than any of its competitors. And, Bezos isn’t dumb, so he’ll build and sell this capacity to others.

It AMAZES ME how unreported it goes that they are doing this right now. They are doing it hilariously upfront and clearly. They bought massive amounts of Sprinters for Amazon Delivery to non urban areas, they are rolling out (classically urban only) Amazon delivery to areas near warehouses right now.

And then.. then. They went out and made an order for 100K Rivian delivery vehicles, ONE HUNDRED THOUSAND. The headlines were all focused on the Tesla factor and how they are electric and nobody bothered to ask.. 'Why?'. That's like the number of trucks UPS Owns, PERIOD. That should have been the headline 'AMAZON ORDERS OWN FLEET TO REPLACE UPS, FEDEX' But nope 'Bezos bets on electric with Rivian order'

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> It AMAZES ME how unreported it goes that they are doing this right now.

It don't think it's a secret. Why do you think it'd be a major story?

> nobody bothered to ask.. 'Why?'

Because they're doing logistics... everyone knows that. Have you never had an Amazon logistics person deliver you parcel?

"Doing logistics" for one's own shipping, is a bit different than "trying to subsume the role of FedEx/UPS in the economy." Certainly it's "only" a matter of scale, but logistics-as-a-service (the business FedEx and UPS are in) is as large a market as the one Amazon's already in, and you'd think clear signs of them being ready to suddenly add another few hundred billion dollars to their market cap would be reflected in e.g. investment people issuing new guidance about them.

I'm not seeing how these dots are hard to connect, since "for ones own shipping" in Amazon's case seems equivalent to "for most consumer shipping".

Amazon packages supposedly account for less than 10% of packages shipped.

Amazon's shipping fleet is on par with FedEx or UPS, and yet smaller than USPS. Most consumer shipping is not done by Amazon

"Investemnt people" are reading research reports from banks (and their own analysts), not relying on mass market papers for the news. You can see it on Bloomberg.com sometimes, there will be a link to a story with more economic detail, but it will be gated by a terminal subscription.

WSJ reported on Amazon's expanding delivery ambitions 3 years ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12600094

"Ambition" rather than 'They are just killing off UPS and FedEx' Its a huge billion dollar story that's been incredibly soft, just look at UPS's stock, this will result in them losing their largest partner, no movement at all.

I am super sure there is an acquisition of one of convoy et al by amazon very soon to build the AWS for trucking as well because they're going to have so much extra capacity in a matter of 2/3 years.

If there's extra capacity, why would they need to make an acquisition?

Convoy like companies don't actually have capacity from my understanding: They are building a uber like platform to share extra capacity. <it is also funded by Bezos> So if Amazon is to build their own trucking-cloud, this is just a logical buy (unless they decide to build in house for some reason)

The huge Amazon Prime planes at Seatac stick out as well.

At least in the UK, this is already the case. Most of my orders are delivered by a delivery company that only handles Amazon packages.

Yep. They also used to drive unmarked vans for a while, but now I see blue Amazon Prime delivery vans everywhere. I still get an occasional item from Amazon delivered by someone else(I guess they still use other couriers when their own capacity is out) but 90% of the time it's delivery by Amazon. And it's much better than anyone else, they give you a relatively precise 2 hour slot and you can see where your driver is on the map. Only DPD did that previously, and even then not for every parcel.

It’s pretty heavily reported my dude. You see articles about it as well as photos showing Amazon logistics planes all the time.

Plus, you see the Amazon trucks all the time now. At least I do. What’s to report?

Frog realizes pot is boiling. Film at 11.

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