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A comment on Amazon Flex. Parent comment

Re:Amazon Flex by organsnyder on Tuesday September 29, 2015 @09:42AM (#10296190)
To get efficiency, delivery companies have highly optimized routes to deliver as many packages in as little time and distance traveled. UPS even has algorithms to reduce the number of left turns. It's probably cheaper for delivery companies to make multiple delivery attempts than it is for them to allow recipients to specify their own delivery times.

Of course, there shouldn't be any logistical impediments preventing the delivery company from notifying you once a more precise delivery window is known.

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Re:Amazon Flex by bitdivision on Tuesday September 29, 2015 @12:10PM (#10297309)
DPD in the UK do this now. The morning of your delivery you get a text message giving you the hour your parcel will be delivered, and a link to rearrange delivery or to track the driver's current location.

To my mind, their system far outstrips the other couriers.

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Re:Amazon Flex by d_theorist on Tuesday September 29, 2015 @12:59PM (#10297637)
Yeah. I had a delivery from them the other day. I could see a map showing exactly where the driver was at any time. Granted, it didn't auto-update, but whenever I reloaded the page it gave me an updated location, and told me where I was in the queue.
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Re:Amazon Flex by petercooper on Tuesday September 29, 2015 @02:32PM (#10298465)
If you use Chrome DevTools, you can get a curl query that will keep grabbing the latest JSON from the tracking. We rigged it up with a check every minute and had it send us a Slack notification when the delivery was under a mile away :-)
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Re:Amazon Flex by dasboth on Tuesday September 29, 2015 @05:52PM (#10300005)
That's a lovely bit of hacking! :)
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Re:Amazon Flex by d_theorist on Tuesday September 29, 2015 @05:26PM (#10299764)
Nice!
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Re:Amazon Flex by sethhochberg on Tuesday September 29, 2015 @12:07PM (#10297276)
I actually just recently learned about UPS's "My Choice" program - it does exactly this, you get more precise delivery windows for packages and a certain number of times per year you can request specific delivery windows.
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