Amazon is going to vertically integrate shipping, no question. The market demands it, and Amazon will probably eventually ship more packages than any of its competitors. And, Bezos isn’t dumb, so he’ll build and sell this capacity to others.
And then.. then. They went out and made an order for 100K Rivian delivery vehicles, ONE HUNDRED THOUSAND. The headlines were all focused on the Tesla factor and how they are electric and nobody bothered to ask.. 'Why?'. That's like the number of trucks UPS Owns, PERIOD. That should have been the headline 'AMAZON ORDERS OWN FLEET TO REPLACE UPS, FEDEX' But nope 'Bezos bets on electric with Rivian order'
It don't think it's a secret. Why do you think it'd be a major story?
> nobody bothered to ask.. 'Why?'
Because they're doing logistics... everyone knows that. Have you never had an Amazon logistics person deliver you parcel?
Plus, you see the Amazon trucks all the time now. At least I do. What’s to report?
As they should. FedEx's customer in this instance is Amazon, not the receiver of the package (who is a customer of Amazon, and Amazon alone). If anyone has the clout these days to hurt FedEx economically if they don't improve, it's Amazon. Amazon should be pushing FedEx (and their other shippers) to be more accountable for late, damaged, and lost packages.
These days both FedEx's and UPS's preferred delivery method seems to be to rake their hands over every single door buzzer to my apartment building, dump the packages outside (insanely unsafe), and run off before anyone has a chance to respond to open the door. They even do this for signature-required packages on occasion, forging the signature. I get that drivers' incentives are completely screwed up regarding how their performance is evaluated, but it's a terrible experience from my perspective.
I would be surprised if Amazon is not using their Ring doorbell cameras to check on deliveries. They will provide evidence of what really happened when customers and delivery dispute it. For example it is clear if the doorbell was rung, or in some cases if the vehicle even went down the street.
I think I ordered socks or something... I couldn't care less. It was jarring, just leave the package in the lobby and send me a delivery notification... geez. Prefer FedEx over that experience.
> In the meantime, I would recommend checking around neighbors and with any other potential members of your household to ensure the package was not incorrectly delivered.
sounds like, they are - by taking a LOT of business from them.
Very similar to the high churn Uber and Lyft experience with drivers. It lasts only as long as you can find people desperate enough to work in these roles.
"Oh, you tried to deliver at 3:13 PM? Well gee, my front door camera sure doesn't seem to show anyone approaching my door at that time!"
But again, you're already dealing with people that will lie to your face, so I can't imagine why video proof would compel them to change their strategy.
- Packages marked as being delivered, but they don't actually show up for another day or two. (I assume this is a driver who can't be bothered to make it to my building that day but doesn't want to get penalized.)
- Entire carriers who systematically fail to deliver. My current apartment building has a near zero delivery rate for packages from USPS that cannot fit in mail slots. UPS and FedEx generally deliver to our package room without issues, but USPS will just claim to have attempted delivery two days in a row then leave the package at their sorting facility for me to pick up (which I won't do). This is clearly a building-wide problem, because I see hand-written notes on our outside door begging USPS to deliver packages. I think the USPS package delivery person simply cannot be bothered to try, and is apparently not incentivized to do so. Thankfully this rarely affects me, because the only time I get larger USPS packages are from rare Amazon deliveries that for some reason use USPS.
- Packages that claim that the delivery was attempted on a Saturday, but are redelivered on Monday. This has bitten me a few times where I took care to rush a package to me when the shipper claimed it could be delivered on a Saturday. I suspect the weekend delivery person cannot be bothered to make it to my building. I can't really blame them. Saturday delivery is fairly new and I can live without it, I just wish the carriers wouldn't promise it then "attempt to deliver" unsuccessfully.
2 have been FedEx, 2 USPS. The rest were Delivered by Amazon deliveries.
OnTrac used to be horrible, but I haven't gotten stuck with them in quite a white.
In turn, that leaves Fedex and UPS absolutely no margin for error. Package shipping errors happen, especially in the weeks before christmas when volume goes through the roof. But Amazon has wasted all the safety margin so if even one error occurs they blow their delivery window.
It's hard to say whether UPS/Fedex have a problem without looking at their metrics, but Amazon sure isn't helping by pushing everything to the bleeding edge. Anecdotally over the last year or so I have noticed an increase to the point where virtually all (let's say at least 75%) of my "2 day delivery" (or even amazon day/no-rush) packages are being shipped like 11 at night on day before delivery and they just beeline it to me same-day.
It's the biggest reason I've stopped shopping at Walmart in recent years. I can't rely on being able to go to the store and expect that everything is in stock.
Let's dust off my old binomial probability skills:
Assume Walmart's just-in-time demand model is accurate to the extent that 1% of items in the store were misjudged and are out of stock. Let's say I go in for a shopping trip of 30 items. I'll have a 26% chance of being disappointed that one of the items I needed was out of stock, and I'll have to go somewhere else now.
Those are completely made up numbers, but it demonstrates how a seemingly small error can be a big inconvenience for someone.
If they can't deliver it within their margin, they shouldn't claim they can.
As much as I'm concerned about monopoly and the potential for anti-competitive behavior... I'm impressed by how effectively Amazon operates at the scale that it does. It's not like Comcast or AT&T which operate horribly at scale. I wish they would get disrupted by Starlink or something and go out of business.
Amazon is an incredibly effective business.
They prioritize customer happiness above profit and put any profits made into growth, so they will continue to grow by making more customers happy and opening new categories.
>>The consumer has come to expect guaranteed overnight or 2 day shipping
Amazon created that expectation.
I know I was perfectly happy when packages that I ordered on the weekend arrived in time for the next weekend most of the time, and never paid for expedited shipping. It was only when most of those packages started taking more than a week to arrive that I finally signed up for Prime.
In one scenario, Amazon utterly destroys the ability of others to sustain their business, and then raises their own prices dramatically: a fairly typical monopoly scenario.
In another there are two tiers: Amazon and everyone else, which is only marginally better.
In both cases competition is reduced and the consumer suffers.
When has that happened? How many times? And how much did it offset the previous period of low prices for consumers?
Amazon is an incredibly sticky brand because they created expectations that you almost have to be vertically integrated (or at least one of the largest customers of the post office, the electric company, the computer hardware company, the software vendor, etc) to fulfill.
If using the established players means the buy button says arrives in 2 days and it arrives in 2 days then I would be SIGNIFICANTLY more satisfied with Prime. I haven’t read enough of the other comments yet to know if my experience is the norm but I really think Amazon would be better off abandoning this whole scheme and letting the pros handle it. It wouldn’t kill American consumers to wait another day.
Side rant: I’m absolutely sick of the armada of rented panel vans from Enterprise blasting random circles through my residential neighborhood. Make them take the earbuds out and for the love of god give them some kind of routing that makes sense.
With the build out of Amazon's own transportation network, Transportation By Amazon is poised to become a reality. The biggest part that remains is the pick-up of packages for shipping / reverse logistics. This should not be too hard, especially as Customer Returns is integrated into Amazon's transportation network.
After Customer Returns is done, it's just a matter of figuring out how to get accurate shipment parameters (box size, weight, type of goods being shipped) and then building a website front-end to advertise and slowly ramp up the capability and learn how to handle different types of exceptional conditions.
Amazon already delivers half of its own packages. Currently they're about 85% of the size of FedEx.
https://www.theverge.com/2019/12/13/21020938/amazon-logistic...
Amazon is trying to to become better, of course.
But it seems they are focusing on things that customers notice, things that are habit forming, while neglecting other areas where, maybe, most customers(maybe not here at HN), don't notice problems.
So fast, effortless delivery(at a price Amazon can afford) is one. And private brands are also another. And TV. And Alexa.
And i think that's where the main focus of their future investments will go, and not as news portrays - towards making themselves more efficient.
I wish this was true but it's obviously not seeing that they haven't fixed the commingling and fake/imposter product issues.
your logic is equivalent to saying, "since the South did not win the Civil War, it’s obvious they did not really care if they were under Union rule or not"
I was thinking of just this (i.e. who is held responsible nowadays by customers of mishandled deliveries) while I was watching, a few days ago, a UPS worker actually throwing boxes out of the back of his truck onto the concrete ground while it was raining.
Hopefully none of those boxes were electronics, which would not have survived such poor handling unscathed.
it's why apple put tilt sensors and shock sensors in their bulk iphone shipments overseas. they can't trust the shipping companies to not do that, unless they know they can be caught.
I feel the elephant in the room is the question of whether Amazon should be allowed to vertically integrate shipping.
Amazon doesn't even offer overnight shipping anymore. This is a big step backward from the days when you were allowed to get one-day shipping as long as you were willing to pay for it. I am totally baffled.
Once the government makes them liable for the actions of their 3rd party delivery services, it will. Until then? I agree, there's not much standing in their way.
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/09/05/us/amazon-delivery-driver...
I've stopped buying from them in light of all the articles detailing the horrendous working conditions and people getting killed because of their contract delivery drivers.
The consumer has come to expect guaranteed overnight or 2 day shipping. When they don’t get that, they get really upset.
Amazon doesn’t want its customers to get upset, and it can’t trust its shipping partners because they don’t have the burden of the consumer sentiment. No one blames FedEx for their late package these days, they blame Amazon. Heck, you don’t have to look hard to find product reviews that only gripe with the shipping time or condition.
Amazon is going to vertically integrate shipping, no question. The market demands it, and Amazon will probably eventually ship more packages than any of its competitors. And, Bezos isn’t dumb, so he’ll build and sell this capacity to others.
Amazon is reaching further and further into the economy, and I don’t see much stopping them.