Originally Posted by
Mobile 155
You have never bought from Amazon have you? The whole idea of shopping at Amazon is the keep from going out. Amazon doesn't make most the stuff they sell they get it from vendors. If the vendor charges 20 bucks for a T-shirt amazon cannot adjust the price on free shipping. If I cannot get it to my door I will just drive to the mall and get it same day.
If the vendor gets the entire $20 price payment and Amazon gets nothing, how does Amazon make money then, exactly?
And no the idea was for Amazon to reduce cost not to help cyclists. The idea was to make Amazon deliveries easier for Amazon by moving employee costs to private contractors. That reduces the personnel cost and increases the balance sheet for Amazon. Amazon is all about profit. Just look at what happened when Seattle levied a tax on employees to help pay for homeless in the city. Amazon cancelled a large building project and was planning on moving 5000 jobs somewhere else. The tax was overturned the very next day.
Who said anything about giving charity to cyclists? They are selling $34,000msrp vans to vendors for $10k. That's a $24,000 subsidy per van. All I said was that if you give the same subsidy to vendors who utilize bike couriers to reduce the number of vans needed per zipcode, you could give the same subsidy to the cyclists. The assumption is that 1 van driver and 5 cyclists can deliver as many packages as 3 van drivers and just as fast. If they have to all be delievered to front doors, the cyclists can do that more efficiently than van drivers, whose vehicle is better suited to making the long trip between the warehouse and each zip+4 areas than to go from house to house.
But, like I said, the reason I don't think they would even consider using bike couriers has nothing to do with delivery efficiency, it has to do with the fact that they're really trying to sell more vans and make more money that way. Business is funny. You can take a less efficient system and use it to create unnecessary sales and then use the unnecessary sales to induce investors to drive up your stock price. That way, you can borrow money against future waste spending to pay for waste in the present.