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Comment by Mountain_Skies | Hacker News Reader

It's difficult to really get a grasp on Amazon's size but it was a bit eye opening the other day when I was driving down a rural road up in the mountains and passed by an Amazon delivery van. I would have assumed for such a remote location that they'd turn their packages over to the post office to deliver but apparently their delivery service is large enough now to service even the very rural areas.

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I live on a small street and had 3 amazon vans delivering at the same time right before Christmas. Up the street they also park big shipping containers (right on a residential street in front of houses) that the usps delivers packages out of. This is 1 community. Their size is insane.

From another angle, here in the Seattle area, I often see USPS trucks delivering Amazon packages on Sunday.

Yeah where I live anything I order from Amazon comes via a third-party courier. Never seen an Amazon van in my neighborhood.

But that's all those trucks are doing on a Sunday, since USPS doesn't deliver mail on Sundays.

The USPS delivers Priority Mail Express on Sundays.

I had a similar experience on a visit to a rural road. They had built Four+ warehouses all serving Amazon traffic.

Yeah, it is always crazy when I see the notice saying the delivery is 10 stop away, and then look to see that the truck is maybe 20 houses down the street.

You're probably overlooking the Amazon distribution center that isn't far away.

I live in a small ruralish area (it's not uncommon for my neighbors to have horses and cows, backyard chickens are a dime a dozen) and at least 50 miles from the nearest amazon distribution center. Our "neighborhood" is 14 homes on 1 1/2 streets. A few years ago, the amazon sprinter van started making some some deliveries but fedex was more likely. Today not only does amazon exclusively deliver all their orders here, we've been upgraded to the larger boxy bread truck style van which makes deliveries to multiple homes in our micro neighborhood every day including Sunday.

All anecdotal but it seems like amazon has made huge progress in their delivery infrastructure in a short period of time.

I heard on NPR that Amazon logistics delivers to a super remote Canadian town that event the post office has trouble delivering to.

Maybe they learned a lesson from all of the failed 'LaserShip' deliveries.

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