Originally Posted by
Mobile 155
this has morphed into something not even vaguely like the origional question. The contractor will have zero control of how the customer gets the package.
The number of deliveries a day that can be made have been studied by delivery services for many years. They have off the shelf software you can buy and simply plug in the type of service you want and it will spit out best routes and number of stops in 8 or 10 hours.
The curve ball is how they establish the number of deliveries. The send out a rabbit. Someone that knows the area real well and will almost run from stop to stop and to and from his truck. I have seen it with ups, and FedX. The customer is not going to come to a will call pick up when they have already been charged shipping.
if the delivery doesn’t show up when they said it should you simply click a button on your account and they reship. Who do you think will get dinged for that delivery?
They aren’t looking to change the system they are looking to get more deliveries for less money.
Google how many deliveries UPS makes a day. Then think what will happen if you get a route like Gallup New Mexico. They may only have one delivery every 3 miles. Picture 200 packages by bike 3 miles apart. That is the life of a route drive. A good route would be San Fernando with one or two deliveries per mile. Once again do the math.
It morphed quite logically, actually. Remember the original point was to use bike couriers to reduce the number of delivery vans. That was solved by having the vans pick up parcels in crates already organized by zip+4.
Then the only question becomes how to make the connection between the van's dropoff location and the delivery address. Amazon is planning to have lockers by people's front door, but they could also have a single locker station in each zip+4 area. The most the van driver would have to do then is sort the parcels into the lockers by address, which would go much faster than driving around doing door-to-door delivery.
Then you say people don't want to go pick up their own parcel in their zip+4 area. Ok, for those who don't they can pay an extra $1 to have it delivered by a bike courier. You say that will add extra cost to shipping, but how much less will shipping cost by having the van drivers only shuttle packages to a single dropoff location in each zip+4 area instead of wasting time going door to door? Every van you cut out of the system saves money UNLESS the vans are being sold at $10k for a profit, in which case the more vans they use, the more profit they make from selling the vans. If that's the case, there's not much hope in using efficiency to save money, because they're making extra money by being more inefficient and thus selling more vans.
edit: I found this article that lays out what the business idea behind Amazon's plan: It seems that Mercedes vans are going to be sold and they're trying to find entrepreneurs to buy 20-40 vans, so apparently there's an overstock of these vans and they want to boost their sales numbers and thus sell higher sales to investors. So I'm sure they wouldn't want any bike-couriers or other efficiency tweaks to get in their way of maximizing van sales by billing it as an opportunity for entrepreneurs to buy the vans in fleets.
https://www.fastcompany.com/40590799...r-its-packages