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.