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Comment by erdle | Hacker News Reader

My startup is bootstrapped and does deliveries.

In fact we actually hired people that hated the old/current Postmates model.

But basically, it's not an easy business model and it's not one that makes financial sense, no matter what the funding, city, tipping situation is.

Deliveries = Time Time = Money

If you want someone to have time to make deliveries, you have to pay them enough money to have that time. Until VERY EXPENSIVE robots and cars replace people, deliveries will always be expensive, and relatively dependent on the speed of traffic + production. And even once we have robots, we'll need to charge enough to cover the robots, the guy that repairs the robots and money to invest in the next robot. That probably will be more than an dollar... especially when you factor in energy for the robots.

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I have a feeling that we'll solve self-driving cars to your driveway a long time before we solve getting the package from there to a person/porch/mailbox.

I reckon for some time we'll see people sitting in self-driving cars just to take care of the final hand over.

Actually, just struck me that what might work is an Amazon Locker on wheels plus an Uber-style app. You track the package drawing near via app (plus alerts) then go outside to grab it from an opening on the van before the vehicle recognises a completed transaction and drives off. You could take a delivery at a park, home, work, anywhere with a road nearby.

TBH, I think drone deliveries are possible today technologically, unlike self driving cars, and those can deliver to most porches.

Drones will have trouble with overhead obstacles and packages above a certain weight for a while, I think.

"I have a feeling that we'll solve self-driving cars to your driveway a long time before we solve getting the package from there to a person/porch/mailbox."

Covering the last 50 meters with a quadrotor has potential. With very short flights and frequent recharges, the carrying capacity could be quite high. You could also deliver to apartment building balconies or trays mounted outside windows.

I think the long-term hypothesis of many of these companies is that you can hit a critical mass where your logistics can be made significantly more efficient. The current efficiency bottleneck, both in terms of cost and time, results from the fact that deliveries are infrequent and relatively distant. If enough people were ordering in an area, the theory goes, you could efficiently route delivery drivers to minimize the amount of time spent between deliveries and restaurants. Whether this works in practice remains to be seen.

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