U.S. Postal Service To Launch Experimental Same-Day Delivery Service In November | Hacker News Reader

U.S. Postal Service To Launch Experimental Same-Day Delivery Service In November

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44 pointsskennedy36 comments

Here is maybe a silly question: I order food every day. I make a phone call or use a website, and an hour later, a pizza or sandwich shows up to my door.

What is prohibitive about doing this for groceries, toiletries, or other other arbitrary merchandise?

It seems like if I order "banana pudding" from my local pizza place, I get it in an hour. If I order "a banana and cup of pudding" from FreshDirect, I have to wait for them to deliver it the next day within a 4-hour window.

Is there something fundamentally different about shipping goods as compared to shipping ready-made food? Why don't we already see more of this?

Many third-world countries already have this—usually fleets of young men on motorcycles that will deliver whatever you need.

i.e. Tons of unused labor at cheap prices.

Oh, so it's just like America.

The USPS once had twice-daily delivery (ended in 1950).

Back then, mail could be delivered same day within a city.

I lived in the UK in the '90s, and at least back then, they still had twice-daily delivery. Even more impressive, in many cases you'd get same-day delivery of normal mail to addresses at the other end of the country.

One very memorable experience I had was sending a check in the mail to London, from Edinburgh, in the morning, and then receiving in return the ordered merchandise in the evening of the same day!!

[Those two cities are very major destinations and so mail between them is presumably well-optimized, but I was pretty flabbergasted that this was possible...]

A friend told me his father used to read the newspaper walking to work then post it back to his wife who would get it at lunchtime. This was London perhaps in the 1930s.

I have heard—though I frustratingly can't find a reference anymore—that even earlier (like 19th or 18th century earlier) mail was delivered frequently enough in a given day that you could receive a letter in the morning, send a reply by mid-day, and get another reply back in the evening.

Incredible connectivity!

If you read the Sherlock Holmes stories you'll notice that he receives several mail deliveries each day.

I wonder if people bitched about mail ruining their life back then the way I feel about my email albatross today. "Cricket! Ten more letters to reply to! Summon the scribe."

That is pretty interesting, although it still pales when you compare it with email.

actually, i have found that this is still possible within new york, if you drop the letter in the mail early enough and the recipient happens to get their delivery later in the day.

next-day delivery within nyc is pretty much de rigueur.

Postmates - for anything - and Instacart - for groceries - are fixing this problem.

Ready-made food is more expensive (and often hot), and there's a considerable demand for it. Same-day delivery of bulk goods doesn't make as much sense.

Couriers already inhabit the same-day postal service, and they're really expensive by comparison to regular post. As a result, you're not going to be shipping non-urgent bulk goods.

When you order cooked food, you're already paying a premium for someone to work on your order right now. So the price differential doesn't seem that great to go from takeout or eat in to delivery. This is why pizza delivery seems so cheap ($4-5 depending on how you tip).

When you're ordering delivery of something that wasn't already priced as on-demand, you're going to find the price dramatically increases and you really don't want to pay 2x the normal price for your toothbrush and 12 pack of soda.

There's also the economies of scale that aren't set up yet--those will help somewhat once same day delivery is widespread.

> When you order cooked food, you're already paying a premium for someone to work on your order right now. So the price differential doesn't seem that great to go from takeout or eat in to delivery. This is why pizza delivery seems so cheap ($4-5 depending on how you tip).

On a related topic, why is only pizza delivery common in many parts of the US? In other countries, such as Japan, you can find home delivery options from all kinds of restaurants, but this doesn't exist in a lot of America, particularly the suburbs.

I have found that most restaurants in my area do deliver but they severely restrict as to how far they will go, so I am mostly out of luck. I think that the answer to your question is mostly a cultural one, pizza places are expected to deliver and be open 24 hours because, hey, it's pizza. However, there is not so much pressure on other restaurants so they avoid the logistics of providing the service or they do so but don't go very far away.

> I think that the answer to your question is mostly a cultural one

Right. I think I was a little opaque here, but my question was really why exactly did that cultural idiosyncrasy develop in America?

Not every food keeps as well as pizza, especially when it takes 30 minutes to an hour to deliver it. Most foods would get cold more quickly or turn to mush.

Some places are really good here in NZ. These guys are close to us and a really good example, online menu http://www.soulthai.co.nz/, free delivery if you spend over $20 and they send their drivers out with mobile EFTPOS (card swiping machines) and let you split it. Pretty good thai too, but really the experience and convenience they offer is why we use them all the time.

I was at a hackathon last weeked called Hackfood[1] that.. well, sounds exactly like the name would imply.

Someone made a really quick hack called DeliveryHop that was actually a really interesting idea. Basically, a system for 'free agents' to pick up orders from restaurants and deliver them, rather than restaurants using their own employees. It seems like it has a ton of benefits (for one, the delivery guy could pick up from multiple restaurants delivering to the same area = efficiency), and could easily expand beyond restaurants.

I have no idea how much restaurants really care about the cost of deliveries, though- in a not-insignificant number of cases it's probably the owner's son doing the delivery, or similar. Still, a fascinating idea.

[1] http://pandodaily.com/2012/10/08/hacking-food-deliciously-wi...

If I'm not misunderstanding you, this seems to be the same thing as Postmates[1]. I've used it for food more than once in SF.

[1] http://postmates.com/

We had a similar thing in my home town in Australia at some point too: the big selling point for me, at least, was that when you were hanging out at a friend's place and you decided that you just wanted to order in, you no longer had to agree on what to get :)

Another business that used to operate, at least, was a liquor delivery service, but only to restaurants. Back there, at least, a restaurant can be licensed to serve liquor, or licensed for BYO (which I presume was cheaper). So what would happen would be a restaurant would be licensed for BYO, but still have a wine menu: when you ordered off the menu, you were technically ordering through the delivery service and they would drop the wine off (they were driving around all the time). So you may have waited a little longer, but it was cheaper for everyone...

If you are in SF, you can do that with groceries. The app is called Instacart. They deliver in 1 hr or 3 hrs depending on the premium.

http://www.instacart.com/?desktop=t

Isn't that what Postmates is? And Kozmo back in the 90s?

USPS is a national treasure. A fantastically efficient organization and an example of a publicly owned and operated entity running well. USPS needs to be increasing services, not cutting services. Saturday delivery should not be cut. Sunday delivery should be added.

USPS is indispensable infrastructure, and crucial to e-commerce.

Amazon is owning retail, and USPS should be fighting to make every Prime delivery in the nation, even on Sunday.

Local post offices have great reach and location. Right now they are prohibited by law from engaging in other services. That law is obsolete.

I agree with some elements of where you are going with this, but caution the general reader to not put too much stake in "new services" or "growth". The USPS needs to shrink, as over 40% of their business is <delivering junk mail>[1]. That was their latest "growth" initiative. Now they overexpanded their overhead, and are facing cuts. New services (not junk) should be added to replace declining 1st class, but the USPS needs to be radically re-scalled and made efficient. This does no mean closing branches, it means cutting overhead. US taxpayers should be subsisizing a communications infrastructure, not be subsidizing a direct-marketing operation.

________________

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Advertising_mail

US taxpayers should be subsisizing a communications infrastructure, not be subsidizing a direct-marketing operation.

Replace communications infrastructure with distribution network, and I totally agree.

I can already communicate across the globe in seconds; USPS should be used for cost-effective, efficient local delivery across the country.

The junk mail operation needs to be reigned in. Right now the Post Office does not need subsidies, that may change in the future. Delivering junk mail is hurting the brand with the tax payers that may be asked to give the subsidy.

The thrust of my argument, that services need to be added and not cut, is to say that the Post Office should be made more useful and not less.

If the utility of the USPS dwindles, and we first cut Saturday delivery, and we close neighborhood Post Offices and make cuts to service so that you cant pick up the phone and get a local employee on to help you. If we go that route, and that is the direction we are headed now, the chorus of voices allied against the Post Office will be bolstered. The public will say, with some justification, that the Post Office is not that useful and therefore should be let go.

A national, publicly owned and operated non-profit efficient distribution network: indispensable to our modern economy.

A better feature would be to add an 'opt out' function for junk mail.

i was just thinking about this. i would collect all mail addressed to "current resident" or something equally vague and every christmas drop it off in front of the post office.

Would you then receive it back in your mailbox? I haven't mailed a letter in years, so I'm not sure junkmail gets stamp-canceled.

They can't add that feature because they already have it.

Not really. The best you can do is opt out of directly mailed advertisements to you, personally. If it's one of those "current resident" things, those get blasted out en masse to every house in an area. You're getting those in your mailbox regardless of how many "do not market" lists you put yourself on.

Where do you think the post office makes most of its money? It's basically a spam operation that subsidizes a useful service.

I'm not affiliated with them but I have been using PaperKarma on my iPhone. I snap a picture of the offending piece of junk mail and they figure out who it's from and submit a request to remove me from the list. Still waiting to see how effective it is but it's very satisfying to get notifications that they correctly identified the spammer and have asked them to remove me from their list.

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