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Amazon Buys Thousands of Its Own Truck Trailers

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Re: Amazon Buys Thousands of Its Own Truck Trailers

#23

Post by jonknee »

douche wrote: post #11

Vertical integration. What percentage of Fedex, UPS, and USPS business is Amazon deliveries? I might be worried if I was in their shoes.

It might not be the end of the world because Amazon shipments have to be quite low margin, but yes I'm sure they are worried. What's probably more concerning is the fact that Amazon has a history of letting other people use their stack (AWS, Marketplace, etc) which could definitely do some damage to UPS/FedEx.

Re: Amazon Buys Thousands of Its Own Truck Trailers

#24

Post by jonknee »

schwap wrote: post #21
douche wrote: post #11

Vertical integration. What percentage of Fedex, UPS, and USPS business is Amazon deliveries? I might be worried if I was in their shoes.

I wouldn't be too worried, yet. There is a lot more to shipping a package from KY to CA than a few trucks.

Well they also have planes and delivery people... It's not that far off. They also have distro centers all over the place so orders frequently come from within a few hours away (or less!) and not a few states away.

http://motherboard.vice.com/read/a-secretive-air-cargo-opera...

Re: Amazon Buys Thousands of Its Own Truck Trailers

#25

Post by andrewstuart2 »

mfenniak wrote: post #9
andrewstuart2 wrote: post #2

It's been mentioned before (I think I saw it here) but trailers like these would be such a great launch platform for drones. They'd no longer be limited to X miles from the Distribution Center, but could just send relatively few trucks out to strategic locations optimized for that day's deliveries, and let the drones launch from there and automatically deliver. Have battery-swapping robots on the truck too so that yo…

But... how does the truck have the inventory to fulfill whatever is ordered, within 30 minutes? You don't know in advance what "the day's deliveries" are going to be, or where they will be, because the drone deliveries are on-demand.

Yeah, I wasn't thinking of the 30 minute delivery in this scenario, but rather an efficient next-day or same-day parcel delivery system. It'd presumably be much more efficient than door-to-door service. If we can perfect driverless vehicles also (driverless delivery trucks, anybody?), this would probably be the ideal delivery scheme. Heck, with that level of automation, if you time things right your trucks may never even need to come to a complete stop.

That said, you could probably extend the range of the 30-minute service with a strategy similar to this. Just bundle orders for 10 minutes, send vehicles 10 minutes out and then the drones fly 5-10 minutes to deliver the package.

Additionally, you could probably keep delivery trucks stocked with some of the top items as well and surprise/delight the customer with "Hey, we just so happen to have 30 minute delivery available now if you want it." I'm no SCM expert, though, so that could very well be a waste of more-valuable space.

Re: Amazon Buys Thousands of Its Own Truck Trailers

#26

Post by chiph »

From people I know in the trucking business, the problem with delivering to Amazon's warehouses is inefficiencies in getting the trucks into and out of the yard. They're just not being run well. Stories of 50-truck-long queues being run off by the local police for blocking entrances to other nearby businesses..

Hopefully this will help, as the trucks can deadhead[0] to their warehouse and do a drop/hook[1], with the trailers being positioned to the warehouse doors by Amazon's own employees acting as yard dogs[2] for loading/unloading the contents. This lets Amazon manage the activity in their yard themselves and hopefully be more organized.

[0] Drive just the truck portion, without a trailer.

[1] The cab (only) portion of the truck drives to where the trailer is, hooks up and drives away with it. Upon delivery, they park the trailer in the yard, lower the landing legs and unhook.

[2] A yard dog is a specialized truck that is shorter and more maneuverable, able to make tighter turns in the confined spaces of a yard.

Re: Amazon Buys Thousands of Its Own Truck Trailers

#28

Post by ASinclair »

andrewstuart2 wrote: post #2

It's been mentioned before (I think I saw it here) but trailers like these would be such a great launch platform for drones. They'd no longer be limited to X miles from the Distribution Center, but could just send relatively few trucks out to strategic locations optimized for that day's deliveries, and let the drones launch from there and automatically deliver. Have battery-swapping robots on the truck too so that yo…

Using drones for last-mile delivery should also help avoid privacy issues since there would be less private property to fly over.

Re: Amazon Buys Thousands of Its Own Truck Trailers

#29

Post by akg_67 »

Amazon is following Walmart playbook. This is what Walmart did to make sure timely (Just-in-Time) Delivery between their warehouse and retail locations.

There are business case study on how Walmart used their own freight truck network to beat their retail rivals by dedicating more space in a retail store to retail shelves instead of storing inventory.

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