Re:Canada Post to phase out urban home mail delivery
by ulfw on Wednesday December 11, 2013 @10:30PM
(#6892630)
Yea but Germany isn't Silicon Valley. So no one cares. Amazon Lockers on the other hand are hyper innovative, because well... er... it's been done stateside. So it must be good. (Even though having lock boxes for each sender is completely inefficient. Do you really want to drive to your Amazon Locker, then your eBay Locker, then your Google Locker... you get the idea?)
Re:Canada Post to phase out urban home mail delivery
by thaumasiotes on Thursday December 12, 2013 @06:05AM
(#6893825)
As I understood the product, your "amazon locker" was your local 7-11. I imagine there's not a major difference in efficiency between having your "amazon locker" at 7-11 along with your conceptually-different "ebay locker", vs having your unified "postal services locker" at 7-11.
Re:Canada Post to phase out urban home mail delivery
by teh_klev on Thursday December 12, 2013 @07:14AM
(#6894037)
In the UK it's both [1]. There's big yellow metal boxes [2] and if there isn't one in the area they deliver to the "7-11" who is probably providing Collect+ [3] type service.
[1]: http://www.amazon.co.uk/gp/help/customer/display.html/?nodeI...
http://www.dhl.de/de/paket/pakete-empfangen/packstation.html
The Deutsche Post DHL Packstations are tied into SMS notifications, and are an optional location you can have letters or parcels delivered to after you've registered for the service. They are located at places like supermarkets. I don't know for certain, but as a private company, I'm sure that DHL is covering the costs of the packstations and making it work from a business perspective.
Other package delivery services like Hermes take different approaches, using convenience stores, bookshops, and other small businesses in the area as package drop-off/pickup centres.
I always find it interesting how weirdly old-fashioned the discussion around mail service monopoly is in the US and Canada while 'socialist' Europe privatized the national postal systems years ago, and Deutsche Post fully lost their monopoly on letter delivery in 2008.