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Comment by mpclark | Hacker News Reader

We could call these local hubs "shops"

Yeah, and perhaps Amazon could let customers browse the available inventory by visiting this "shop" in person, if no one's made a purchase yet.

Ah, similar to Amazon's "shopping cart," the shop could provide a physical cart (imagine a cross between a baby stroller and a faraday cage) to help customers carry inventory to the exit of the store.

Why stop there? Similar to amazon one click purchase, if customer has amazon credit card with rfid chip, they can simply pick up the item and walk out of the store - it would be charged auto magically.

Actually that is pretty sweet idea.

And if the customer is too busy to visit the physical store, or just doesn't feel like it, Amazon could put the pictures of all of the products they have on a web site, and simply mail the customers their selections.

That's a pretty good idea, but don't you think it would take too long for the shipments to get there?

They should come up with a way of tracking what pictures people look at and then shipping the stuff in the pictures to the warehouses near those people. I bet you could do the picture tracking thing with an ActiveX control. That wouldn't work in Navigator, of course.

We could get around that issue by having a dedicated program for looking at the pictures. We will develop a networked software delivery system that people will use to install this program quickly and easily.

I see where you're going with that, but I don't think delivery of software over a so-called "network" will ever be feasible. Even with a 1200 baud modem, transferring a multi-kilobyte .exe would take hours, and that's assuming the BBS doesn't drop the connection partway through!

It seems more realistic to transmit the pictures using CD-ROM technology: it's like Netflix, but for CD-ROMs. Amazon would mail you their catalog CD-ROM, and you look at a slideshow of all the products they sell. Then, when you decide what you want, simply fax your order to Amazon, and they tell you which "shop" to drive to in order to pickup your merchandise.

I'd love a shop that only sells things that I would want to buy.

We could let people visit them in order to check out the products in person, before they buy them.

Unfortunately, reasonable customer-oriented space is much more expensive than a (semi-robotic) dimly lit warehouse somewhere on the industrial outskirts of a city.

It's worse than that. Apparently, you need to hire people to stand around all day and run cash registers.

They should go back to the drone delivery plans, they were more thoroughly thought out.

My grocer has self-checkout.

Shops that deliver.

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