Today's soccer shoe emergency is tomorrow's normal turnaround. Imagine trying to explain to someone living in the 90s that they just have to watch this one TV show right now.

Surely they could just walk down to their local video rental store, not that many people really need to watch something right now!

But once something like BitTorrent & Netflix happens it becomes the new expectation. I think something like drone delivery or delivery via autonomous vehicles is going to similarly change the market for the delivery of physical goods.

To further elaborate your point, I think it is also about reducing friction. People will probably still go grocery shopping but if you were fairly confident that something you are not sure if you need is available both at Wally's world and at Amazon.com for about the same price, would you rather buy it anyways during your grocery run or put it off until you know you will need it?

I don't want to think whether I will need something near the end of the week. We throw big words like nothing but I concede this is one of the hard problems where the idea of express shipping (drones, land robots, or even delivery humans) in conjunction with large distribution networks could have profound impact on the way we shop.

While the distribution warehouse infrastructure of Walmart is probably nothing to laugh at, I imagine a large portion of the infrastructure is not centrally owned and managed by Walmart. Just like the famous "the network is the computer" motto, I bet Amazon thinks the warehouse infrastructure is the retail store.

(To go a little off-topic, the physical Amazon.com book shop sounds strange to me. I don't get it.)

This will sound a bit off kilter, but except for truly emergent situations (injury, medication, etc.) it's good to have some "friction" otherwise we could end up with a population demanding immediate satisfaction and perfection from everything, whereas many things will remain imperfect and unrealized. Why can't my government change right now the way I want it! Why are they serving someone else in need and not me!

I have a fear we're on the way to creating a whole class of people who are totally dependent on the system for everything. There will always be people who are well rounded and know the relationships between things (i.e. know where the sausage comes from)

Why shouldn't we demand immediate perfection? Why should we have to choose between serving someone else and serving me? Why shouldn't governments immediately change?

All the problems with having these things today are implementation problems not fundamental issues.

We want a delay between what we think we want and what we get from government, else we get majority rules democracy which is not far removed from mob-mentality government.

I think you're stretching a little to get from faster merchandise delivery to mob-rule government.

Or, your objections would have been valid against the railroad and the telegraph as well (both of those reduced friction tremendously).

I get the gist of what you're saying, but I don't agree that artificially limiting technological innovation, or improvements in efficiencies is beneficial at all.

I think railroads reduced times to human times (from weeks/months to hours/days --but it wasn't a snap of the finger kind of response.

The objection I have is more with the psychology rather than the physicality of it. It makes things more disposable. You lost a sneaker, we get it replaced in minutes. It's allowing people to gorge on consumerism. It also puts the local shops at a disadvantage. But, mostly, it removes the barrier to thinking about buying more. You don't have to think about waiting till tomorrow, or two days from now, or having to walk twenty minutes, or get out and take transit, or jump into a car to go satiate the impulse. No, all you need is your desire (and buying power) and it's fulfilled.

Fair point. This just happened to me yesterday. I needed a 3.5mm to RCA cable to connect my TV to the receiver[1]. The one I had wasn't long enough, so I found one on Amazon and ordered it for the next day.

By the time it was delivered, I had already found my long-lost extension cable and didn't need it anymore.

Waste of money and—to your point—if I didn't have that option I probably would have searched a little more around the house before resorting to buying a new one.

Ultimately I still want to see these things advance, though. Whatever mechanism that would set lower bounds on delivery times would be worse than the problem it would be intended to prevent.

[1] Never mind why the TV only outputs audio on a 3.5mm jack, kinda cheap.

That ship sailed with plumbing and the electric grid.

One word (well, acronym): DIY. Middle-class suburban dad is trying to fix the newly-bought house, but he's constantly running out of the right size of screws and/or stuff he didn't even know he needed. At the moment that scenario results in a a lot of trips to the hardware store, but cheap 60-minute deliveries would change it for the better.

Neonatal supplies, cleaning supplies, you name it -- the sort of thing you really don't want to shop for, it's bulky and you never know if you're getting the right brand: if you could order it from a bookmark, knowing you'll have it in 60 minutes, then the actual shopping experience would become much more fun, because you can actually pay attention only to the funky meals you'll cook and the new stuff you can try.

And of course, geeks would jump on this like crazy -- 60-minute deliveries for new hard disks, mice, games and any other soho/gaming equipment? I would sign in blood ink right now.

I have my doubts the drone model can scale (for example, in Manchester, UK today we had 80mph gale winds...), but it's an awesome idea that would definitely change retail.

I drove to the hardware store three times during the course of a single plumbing project yesterday. Each time, I bought everything I thought I would need to finish the rest of the project! I'm not even in the suburbs, I'm right in the middle of Seattle. I definitely would have paid extra for drone delivery instead of making that third trip, because I was really tired of driving across town at that point.

To be fair, in the long run the DIY use case is more likely to be served via personal fabrication. For small finicky bits like screws, being able to print-on-demand is going to be quicker and easier than waiting for a drone.

lol delivering a physical game

A 20GB game (which is far from unusual now) in 30 minutes = 89mbit/sec, which is eight times the US national average broadband speed.

Ever tried to download a boardgame / tabletop? It's hard :)