Last Mile Logistics: Amazon vs. Fedex vs. Startups

What's interesting to me is that "last mile logistics" is essentially a commodity business. But there are two very common trends in the space that don't quite make sense to me:

1. Treating delivery drivers as "independent contractors". This seems to be a very common approach, with all kinds of plausible motivations (limiting liability, making variable demand handling easier, being able to call your service a "platform", keeping headcount cosmetics appealing for parent VCs, etc). Historically, delivery driving is a usually regulated and often unionized industry, so I wonder if this approach will scale. There are also often distortionary impact of these contractors on overall regulated wage industries (hint: your postmate probably does not make a living wage for the time spent being a postmate). Viewed from the lens of potential acquirers, if your "efficiencies" are based around not paying drivers in the same way they have been historically paid, that is not something I need to acquire.

2. User acquisition seems to be at a premium - quite a few of the delivery-on-demand businesses in San Francisco have been running generous new user and user referral discounts recently. It makes sense if their goal is to increase user rolls, but I find that most of these services have limited, if any, lock-in effects [a]. Obviously, in order to innovate on delivery-at-scale, companies must first achieve sufficient scale to be able to prove out new ideas. But, from my peanut gallery seat, the user acquisition strategies appear to be driven more by the "acquire users first and monetize later" strategy that happens when many similar VC companies are competing for the same users. Amazon/Google/etc don't tend to get excited about acquiring you for your user base, unless you can demonstrate high brand value or user loyalty, which seems particularly challenging in this industry.

So, my $0.02 is simply that platformization followed by paid user acquisition seems to be the template for this industry, and yet it does not make sense to me.

[a] I have heard recently of a local, "last mile" food delivery start-up that is approaching it's vendors with exclusive sales agreements. I am not sure how effective this well be - the business from whom I heard that also found the request completely ridiculous.

  Amazon’s in-house delivery initiatives have not been 
  without hiccups. [...] Perhaps Amazon could benefit from 
  the slew of startups entering the space, either through 
  acquisition, or by learning from and copying and 
  identified best practices.

Seems to me if you're going to acquire a company for its experience, it would be better to acquire a company that had experience.

The startups that are legible in their 'age vs quality estimate', Kanga and Shyp, rely on self-employed subcontractors using smart phones. Here in the UK, delivery services like Yodel that use self-employed drivers have shitty reputations [1]; if Amazon want to improve end-to-end customer experience, I'd be surprised if they went down that route.

[1] http://www.theguardian.com/money/2014/jan/10/yodel-worst-par...

With Google Shopping Express & Instacart as well as the Postmates and DoorDash's of the world - I keep wondering...at what scale do these become huge businesses? Especially Instacart and GSX - they have someone go shopping and bring stuff to my home for $4 and for free right now. I guess it's user acquisition land grab + demand aggregation? And then they can go the route of private labeling the best goods and ultimately own the customer and then charge higher prices? They can't possibly make real $ at $4 per delivery, can they?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=urs68vf7ZFY I've been doing my last-mile logistics by drone for a while, is that OK?

Same as supermarkets - once you own more of the wallet you'll get the margins. They're just shifting it from the supermarket to them.. quietly.