41–50 of 85 posts
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Efficiency aside, that feels like awful planning to me. Growing up in the Bay Area, the threat of a significant earthquake has been ever-present. My family always had several dozen bottles of water and a reasonable amount of canned/jarred/dried food around.
Yeah, but do you want that sort of food when you are sick? Plus I don't dig into my emergency supplies when there are other options available.
I tell you, this service has been a godsend. Emergency trip to the hospital, no food at home? Prime Now. Living alone sick, no food in the home? Prime Now. Parents feeling poorly and I'm 3 states away? Prime Now.
> Living alone sick, no food in the home? Prime Now.
> Parents feeling poorly and I'm 3 states away? Prime Now.
I hope that any of those three events don't happen to you (or to anyone else) very often.
I mean, I perfectly understand the utility of the service, in a given set of "emergencies", but the profitability (at scale) would come if the service is used consistently, every day, not in a handful of (hopefully) not often recurring cases.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
The lockers are amazing. If you live in an apartment building, the leasing offices which sign for packages are often only open during business hours. If you live in a house, there's a good chance that someone grabs your package off your porch. So what do you do if you need a strip of LEDs for a project that you're putting together by this weekend and you don't have the right hours open in your schedule? (Or [insert r…
> If you live in an apartment building, the leasing offices which sign for packages 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 mostl…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
The lockers are amazing. If you live in an apartment building, the leasing offices which sign for packages are often only open during business hours. If you live in a house, there's a good chance that someone grabs your package off your porch. So what do you do if you need a strip of LEDs for a project that you're putting together by this weekend and you don't have the right hours open in your schedule? (Or [insert r…
> If you live in an apartment building, the leasing offices which sign for packages 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 mostl…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
>Droning looks like a gimmick today, but why should it be in the future? It's loud. And dangerous.
I'll be the devil's advocate here: Cars are loud and dangerous - we figured it out as a society.
I tell you, this service has been a godsend. Emergency trip to the hospital, no food at home? Prime Now. Living alone sick, no food in the home? Prime Now. Parents feeling poorly and I'm 3 states away? Prime Now.
>Emergency trip to the hospital, no food at home? Prime Now. > Living alone sick, no food in the home? Prime Now. > Parents feeling poorly and I'm 3 states away? Prime Now. I hope that any of those three events don't happen to you (or to anyone else) very often. I mean, I perfectly understand the utility of the service, in a given set of "emergencies", but the profitability (at scale) would come if the service is use…
I would frequently get heads down on a project, realize I needed widget X, would order on Prime Now, continue my work, and have the widget when I needed it.
As soon as it’s introduced to Birmingham my suburban life will be complete...
Nonsense.
Amazon Flex will eventually encompass more than just delivering goods. Delivering people (uber/lyft). Retrieving packages from households and shipping them, maybe even last mile delivery? 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 Amazo…
Still, as an Amazon investor, I do wonder why Amazon has to do everything themselves. It makes me nervous that they are essentially building or their own ride sharing network rather than leveraging existing networks.
There's a revolution coming to urban logistics that people like this author cannot understand. What Uber has demonstrated is that cities are much more efficient than anybody previously imagined. The day is fast approaching when on demand transport of everything will be cost effective and when that happens cities will be remade. All that retail space can become storage. Restaurants lose their tables and become industrial kitchens. Office space becomes highly fragmented with possibly just core teams of 10-20 people requiring co-location. Schools fragment; students will go to specialized teachers and facilities wherever they happen to be rather than betting everything on monolithic school systems. (Education "regresses" into large scale tutoring.) Hospitals ironically grow more centralised as technology becomes every more sophisticated. Tying all of this together will be extremely sophisticated and dynamic transport networks that can indeed move anything anywhere in the city in under an hour for very low cost.
This is already happening in China btw. This sort of urban hyper-on-demand culture has already taken hold. The author will look back on this article on ten years and regret that they failed to see the revolution.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> If you live in an apartment building, the leasing offices which sign for packages 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 mostl…
Yes it's very common to rent from a company rather than individual landlords. Some of these companies are massive managing hundreds of thousands apartments. Many of the building are specifically built as rentals and all units are for rent hence there is often a leasing office somewhere in the building.
I tell you, this service has been a godsend. Emergency trip to the hospital, no food at home? Prime Now. Living alone sick, no food in the home? Prime Now. Parents feeling poorly and I'm 3 states away? Prime Now.
>Emergency trip to the hospital, no food at home? Prime Now. > Living alone sick, no food in the home? Prime Now. > Parents feeling poorly and I'm 3 states away? Prime Now. I hope that any of those three events don't happen to you (or to anyone else) very often. I mean, I perfectly understand the utility of the service, in a given set of "emergencies", but the profitability (at scale) would come if the service is use…
> Need kitty litter but don't have a car and don't want to hulk 80 lbs of litter home? Prime now.
> Need a random ass torx screw driver and don't want to drive to home depot across town? Prime now.
> Forgot the ground beef but don't have time to get it because the oven is already on, cooking for the company coming over? Prime now.
> At a beer festival and sick of standing but didn't bring your camping chairs because you don't have any? Prime now.
> Standing in line outside in the rain but didn't bring an umbrella? Prime now.
> Ran out of Christmas cards? Prime now.
> Nieces birthday and no time to go shopping? Prime now.
As somebody who lives in the city without a car and nowhere near a home depot or a grocery store that is open past 10pm, prime now has been an absolute godsend. The fact that I can order a ton of items that I just _cant_ find locally no matter how hard I look, but also don't want to wait for shipping from Amazon/Ebay/whatnot is an absolute godsend.
I don't think you need to cook up an emergency to have a good reason to use Prime Now. I have tons of 'micro emergencies' every month where I'd gladly tip my driver a bit to bring my items within a few hours.