Companies owning their transport assets was the norm for a long time. Until they figured out that subcobtracting that two dedicated carriers, in Amazons case FedEx or DHL among others, was better. Read morw profitable.

Amazon simply reached a point where they would have had to co invest woth their carriers. So investing in oen assets made a lot more sense. And Amazon has the scale, and means to control their sypply chain, to maximize utilization of their transpirt assets.

Worth noting so, that Amazon is using a lot of third party drivers, same as DHL and others are doing.

I remember Supreme Court ruled that FedEx must employ all their delivery drivers (they were all contractors before). How are Amazon delivery drivers better?

FedEx does not employee all their delivery drivers. There were a couple of state supreme court laws which classified some contractors as employees under state laws and required back compensation. Fedex stopped using the business model in question in 2011.

Currently for FedEx Home Delivery, which is most similar to Amazon Delivery, FedEx sells delivery routes to independent delivery operators which they then pay to deliver packages on those routes. The delivery operators then employee the drivers and not FedEx. In many circumstances the independent operators and delivery drivers are one and the same. The drivers tried to unionize saying they were in reality employees of FedEx. FedEx refused to recognize the union and a claim was filed with National Labor Relations Board. The NLRB sided with the drivers but their decision was overruled by the DC circuit court of appeals in 2017. By that time a new administration was in charge and the decision of the court was not appealed by the NLRB. The court based their decision by the fact that the independent delivery operators can hire/fire drivers and helpers without input from FedEx and that they can resell the routes independently of FedEx.

Amazon Delivery operates under a similar model. All those Amazon delivery vans you see are run by independent delivery operators which hire the drivers. Each delivery operator runs at least 5 vans with the norm being between 20 - 40.

I can't talk about the US, in Germany they are mainly sub-contractors. Easy to spot by their Yellow AMZN badges. DHL and company are doing the same thing so.

Whew, I was under impression that Germany has one of the most strictest employee protections.

The article makes a pretty good argument about why Amazon won't replace shipping infrastructure. They are in the business of delivering on short-term consumer demand, where the supply chain can ideally be shortened to weeks or days. Owning container ships is about filling them every day for years, which is a bit of a mismatch. Never say never, though!

They're just thinking slow. Amazon already knows that they're building infrastructure that they will use for all kinds of transport, everywhere.

We still have Walmart :P $523B 2020 rev vs Amazon $386B