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Comment by jamesaguilar | Hacker News Reader

> A couple months ago I saw an ad on the NY subway for a company that delivers dog food and pet supplies to your door (deja vu anyone).

To be fair, this is a lot more feasible now than it was back then. I'm not sure what's making it so. Higher volume of willing-and-able-to-internet customers? Better routing? But I cite as evidence the number of established players who are dipping their toes into the same-day-service market.

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Delivery costs have plummeted because of the enormous amount of machine intelligence being used by courier companies. Better routing algorithms reduce fuel and staffing costs, better machine vision technology allows package labels to be read and sorted at high speed. Mail-order companies and delivery services have formed a symbiotic virtuous circle of business development - greater volumes of mail reduce per-unit costs, which encourages an increase in volume. Amazon are the prime (no pun intended) example of this, with their progressive diversification into selling bulkier and lower-value items.

I'd be more willing to believe in pet-goods delivery as part of a generalized grocery-delivery service.

Normally yes, but NYC is sort of the Big Exception in the US - it's the only city in the country where the density is so insanely high that I can imagine niche delivery businesses surviving.

We've seen this with eBay Now - the economics are sustained by limiting service to only zip codes with sufficient density.

I agree. The main problem with the original idea, IIRC, is that the product is cheap and heavy-- low margins and high shipping costs. The consumer was simply better off getting it at the store.

the ads i've seen in the subway are from wag.com, which is indeed part of a generalized delivery service.

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