The Illusion of a Profitable Amazon Prime Now and Prime Fresh

My emergency supplies have food, but I don't eat the emergency food unless there is an emergency.

You cannot evaluate Prime related services in isolation because the whole point of Prime is that you get a bundle of services that make your life easier and allow you to get a bunch of things for a flat subscription rate. Some of those services could be forever unprofitable, but if you remove them from the bundle, you could be destroying more value and making the whole program unprofitable.

The author fails to evaluate at least two key points:

1) Prime is still in its infancy. It's clear that Amazon's goal is to reach a total share of the market that can only be compared to paying for your phone bill, except in this case the phone bill is Prime, and Amazon is the only provider. That changes the whole picture regarding economies of scale and flywheel effects.

2) The author did his pseudo-experiments (asking Prime Now drivers how many deliveries they did last hour ) in Seattle (I presume since he mentions he is a PM at Amazon).

Of course Prime Now it's not going to be profitable in all markets but it's also not that far from breaking even. The real profitability will come from highly concentrated markets like NYC and Singapore.

I feel like this article completely misses the point about the Amazon philosophy. It doesn't matter if Prime Now / Amazon Fresh are profitable. They aren't supposed to be profitable. They are building out the infrastructure of Amazon Flex for themselves AT COST and then they will open it up to other services and uses that will undercut any competitors (rideshare is the first one that comes to mind)

The focus here should be on Amazon Flex and how/where it is going, because that service will be the one that turns the actual profit. Just like AWS.

Somewhat OT, but are these common in US (or wherever you are)? If so, out of interest, what other duties to they have?

In Finland, I've never seen such offices even in the larger apartment buildings with hundreds of dwellings.

Parcel lockers (both public and recently in apartment buildings) are a thing here as well, but they are mostly replacing pickup-from-post-office. Home delivery has always been a premium option when ordering online, not the norm. The network here is owned by Posti so any company or individual can send packages to them, or use them to send packages at cheaper rates than going to the post office.