Originally Posted by
tandempower
If the vendor gets the entire $20 price payment and Amazon gets nothing, how does Amazon make money then, exactly?
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.
the make their money because it isn’t always free shipping. Or if you are a prime member it is part of what you are paying the service for.
Brick and mortor stores offer a chance to save shipping cost for online orders by shipping to the store. Then you simply drive to the store and pick it up. They don’t have to build lockers and they don’t need to hire a contractor to deliver to sub contractors who deliver to customers.
You simply cannot save money for your stock holders by adding staff. You sure cannot if you are adding two levels of staff between the customer and the store.
Let us say you found a way to build lockers that you dropped in a parking lot are you assuming no one will charge for the lockers? Once it is learned Amazon has lockers in that parking lot who will protect them from vandals at night?
Think of it, TVs, computers, watches, air Jordan’s, rings and other jewelry just sitting there waiting for an angle grinder. They do that to mail boxes now .
i know I am wasting my breath because Amazon has not entertained contractors and sub contractors. But I also know such ideas fit some people’s dreams about what could be if the world was different. So jump into it. Get someone to commit to the van and talk them into adding cyclists to help. Let us know how it works out.