Why can't the real goal be the stated one? It's already very beneficial to Amazon, serving to further build a moat around Amazon being where you buy everything.

This constant lazy conspiracy theorizing every time a large company does anything is really grating.

But it's also a worthwhile exercise. Should we just always take them at their word? History has proven we shouldn't.

i was responding to the parent who said " I can only conclude" so i thought that providing an alternative conclusion would add to the discussion.

i don't think this is lazy conspiracy... many amazon pages in the U.S. heavily promote their home services offerings so it is clearly an important initiative for them. furthermore, "amazon key" does solve a really big problem with home services: service pros typically work during the business day, but some (perhams most) of the best customers are at work during that time.

Also food delivery, so they could put food in your fridge. It's not hard to imagine Amazon stocking everyone's pantries during the day while people are at work.

Amazon should have bought TaskRabbit for that!

Kind of an amazing age where the concept of a butler on demand is available to the middle class. I don't like the idea for myself, but the concept is incredible.

Actually, for the middle class (which was admittedly somewhat smaller than what we may think of as "middle class" now) domestic help was pretty normal before the 20th century. http://www.bradford-delong.com/2013/01/agatha-christie-i-nev... is somewhat telling; Agatha Kristie's Wikipedia entry says her family was "upper middle-class", but it's not that common for families like that to have live-in help nowadays. Except maybe au pair arrangements.

Having occasional domestic help has been typical of the middle class in capitalist societies for a long time; in early capitalist societies, often full-time rather than occasional, but with smaller staff than the upper class.

That's a good point. There are probably other possibilities, but I think that this is about more than package delivery.

Haven't a bunch of people failed to establish themselves as that particular middleman?

(pretty much because anyone good at doing the cleaning can just cut out the middleman)