Amazon Bringing Same-Day Delivery To 'Millions' of Rural Customers (theverge.com) 52
Amazon today announced its intention to bring same-day and next-day delivery to "tens of millions" of people who live in live in smaller towns by the end of 2026. From a report: Speedier deliveries will be available to residents "in more than 4,000 smaller cities, towns, and rural communities," the company said in a press release Tuesday.
Items categorized as "everyday essentials," including groceries, beauty products, household goods, or pet food, will now be available to small town or rural customers for same-day or next-day delivery. If they are Prime subscribers (currently $14.99 a month or $139 annually), they get unlimited free same-day delivery when spending over $25 at checkout.
Items categorized as "everyday essentials," including groceries, beauty products, household goods, or pet food, will now be available to small town or rural customers for same-day or next-day delivery. If they are Prime subscribers (currently $14.99 a month or $139 annually), they get unlimited free same-day delivery when spending over $25 at checkout.
Without drones? (Score:2)
How can it be done without drone delivery tech?
Re:Without drones? (Score:5, Insightful)
By replacing Walmart at its own game. Already, you have stores like Walmart serving these areas. Replacing that with a mini warehouse that doubles as a staging area for two-day deliveries coming from larger warehouses is going to be lots more efficient.
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Walmart is often times cheaper than Amazon.
Re: Without drones? (Score:2)
Indeed. But the Walmart customer service really sucks. Amazon is the complete opposite. It is worth paying a bit more, for many items, but not all.
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Indeed. But the Walmart customer service really sucks. Amazon is the complete opposite. It is worth paying a bit more, for many items, but not all.
The Walmart customer service is worse than Amazon? They're both pretty terrible, but at least Walmart doesn't want me to return the broken cookies for a refund. :-D
In rural areas, I can get same-day delivery of lots of stuff from Walmart. With Amazon, things that can be delivered same-day to me in California take two days, and everything else takes three. And because Amazon delivers with USPS, and because small towns don't do Sunday delivery, when there's a Monday holiday, Amazon can take up to five days,
Re: Without drones? (Score:2)
I'm in California and Amazon delivers every day. Sometimes in less than 24 hours. There are farms 2 houses down, with cows and goats, but still only 7 miles from downtown SJ. Amazon has lost a couple packages over the years, but it's less than 0.1% of all orders.
Walmart messes up about 20% of orders. Drivers not picking them up. Not delivering them. Marking them delivered. Etc. Nearly impossible to get a human being to correct it. Credit card despite is the main way. Its 30 min to checkout at the store. 1 h
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Delivery trucks.
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Tunnels. Big beautiful tunnels. The best tunnels.
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Alligators.
Originally mastered by narco-gangs to smuggle illicit substances up and down the estuary delta, zoologists from Amazon have found our new reptilian overlords can also be used as mules for consumer electronics such as smartphones with a IP68 rating. A teething problem was exploding batteries but with a lot of alligators out there complaining about working conditions, absorption of lithium into their bloodstream provided a boost in antidepressant vibes. /s
Re: Without drones? (Score:2)
I'm in a rural area about 25 miles from Walmart and they deliver same day to me.
Re: Without drones? (Score:2)
No drones involved. (Forgot that part)
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Prime member here. I live in a rural area of a large urban city. Over 50% of the same-day deliveries I order get delayed or lost. They need to fix this problem before branching out to other areas...
There are periods when half of my deliveries get delayed by a day. Still better than rural areas, where fast Amazon deliveries are three days. Lost deliveries? Maybe you should think about security cameras. :-)
Possible game changer for poverty levels (Score:3)
If this is real rural rather than "Suburb with pick-up trucks that drive by a field of cows on their way to the office" rural, then this could be a game changer in terms both of reducing food deserts and bringing competition to some of the slimier companies that bribe officials to get tax cuts, put the few local stores out of business, and then charge monopoly prices on the people who are in the area.
But as always we have to look at what Amazon will charge for this. And will they abuse their monopoly if they gain one?
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They do offer half-price Prime delivery if you have an EBT card.
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Exactly, what most of the folks on /. think is "rural" is funny. As soon as the multi-story buildings become sparce they are in the "country". When your nearest neighbor is measured in miles or even quarters of a mile, than you might be a rural resident. If it's 15 minute drive by open hwy to your nearest gas station or grocery store, than you might be a rural resident. Actual rural residents will never have even two day shipping, let alone same day, hell we don't even get USPS delivery to our houses.
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Yeah that's what I was hinting at in my comment. There's so much culture war bullshit wrapped around definitions of "rural" and "urban" that when people claim to live in the country, I usually disbelieve them unless they actually describe things more specific. Chances are they just have certain politics and therefore have decreed that driving past a cow on the way to work makes them rural.
I would hope though that a corporation making an announcement like this is not talking about suburbs.
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Exactly, what most of the folks on /. think is "rural" is funny. As soon as the multi-story buildings become sparce they are in the "country". When your nearest neighbor is measured in miles or even quarters of a mile, than you might be a rural resident. If it's 15 minute drive by open hwy to your nearest gas station or grocery store, than you might be a rural resident. Actual rural residents will never have even two day shipping, let alone same day, hell we don't even get USPS delivery to our houses.
Back home in Tennessee, we used to have reliable two-day shipping out in the middle of nowhere (a town of 11,000 people, an hour from the nearest small cities, 3 hours from the nearest major cities). Then Amazon decided to cut costs and started using US Postal Service (and/or the cheap UPS/FedEx options that use USPS for the actual customer deliveries) for all of their rural deliveries instead of using UPS and FedEx two-day service. Now, we have reliable three-to-five-day shipping.
Fast, cheap, reliable.
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I'd be shocked if you live somewhere that doesn't have Walmart same-day delivery. Walmart has a 30-mile delivery radius, and probably 99.5% of people in the U.S. are within that radius of at least one Walmart store. Even way out in the country, Walmart will do delivery.
Well, prepare to be shocked. My nearest Walmart is ~1.5 hrs. away at 62.6 miles (according to Google maps). Believe me, I would do some degrading things to get same-day delivery from Walmart. My father-in-law is in his mid '80s and it's life changing for him. My wife just orders what ever he wants, (including groceries) and it's there that day or the next if he prefers. He is also rural but his nearest little city was once the center of logging in Ca so it has a lot of things that most that size would
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I'd be shocked if you live somewhere that doesn't have Walmart same-day delivery. Walmart has a 30-mile delivery radius, and probably 99.5% of people in the U.S. are within that radius of at least one Walmart store. Even way out in the country, Walmart will do delivery.
Well, prepare to be shocked. My nearest Walmart is ~1.5 hrs. away at 62.6 miles (according to Google maps). Believe me, I would do some degrading things to get same-day delivery from Walmart. My father-in-law is in his mid '80s and it's life changing for him. My wife just orders what ever he wants, (including groceries) and it's there that day or the next if he prefers. He is also rural but his nearest little city was once the center of logging in Ca so it has a lot of things that most that size would not.
Wow. That's amazing. Which near-zero-population area are you in — northern California, extreme northern Texas, northeastern New Mexico, western Oklahoma, rural Montana, rural Idaho, rural Utah, rural Colorado, rural Kansas, rural Nebraska, or rural parts of one of the Dakotas? :-)
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Wow. That's amazing. Which near-zero-population area are you in — northern California, extreme northern Texas, northeastern New Mexico, western Oklahoma, rural Montana, rural Idaho, rural Utah, rural Colorado, rural Kansas, rural Nebraska, or rural parts of one of the Dakotas? :-)
Nope, in the foothills of central Ca near Yosemite National Park. Everyone seems to think that Ca is nothing more than LA , the beaches, or the Bay. There is a huge Central Valley and a large mountain range as well, lots
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I'd call that Northern California, but sure. :-D
California is... different. The extent to which the state rejects Walmart is legendary.
Amazon needs Operation Spiderweb (Score:2)
Also coming (Score:2)
Amazon will also roll out the "Random default to Amazon Day delivery" feature as well.
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That level of service is why we live in cities
But do "we" live in cities? "We" have a lot of remote workers now. "We" have become frustrated and disgusted with what "we" have made of our cities. "We" have perpetrated a mass exodus from cities and "we" have taken our incomes with us. Thus, Amazon is following us, because that's where at lot of the money "we" have has gone.
Ruraloids don't need cheap Chinese
Roraloids need tools and machines. They need supplies: fluids and blades and gaskets and parts of every conceivable thing. More so than urbanoids that don't do things beyond eatin
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I just want to own more acreages and it's not so easy now.
Does your righteous anger extend to the solar industry, paving over 1000 acre chunks of rural land with each new deployment? Wiping out farms and forested habitat?
I'm betting not. I'm betting your anger is highly selective; reserved for only some of the forces making your dreams more expensive.
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I just want to own more acreages and it's not so easy now.
Does your righteous anger extend to the solar industry, paving over 1000 acre chunks of rural land with each new deployment? Wiping out farms and forested habitat?
I'm betting not. I'm betting your anger is highly selective; reserved for only some of the forces making your dreams more expensive.
Well there's a whatboutism of sizzle!
Paving? Our solar fields here are built on the fields with good old dirt underneath. I'm not certain, but I think the farmer gets money via rent as well, if not made a lot of money in an outright sale.
I bet with a little ingenuity, they could even farm underneath them. A lot of plants grow just fine under the panels, and it's been a real boon for birds. Protection from rain and predators. No one here in PA is complaining about the bad impact on Farmers that I know
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But do "we" live in cities? "We" have a lot of remote workers now. "We" have become frustrated and disgusted with what "we" have made of our cities. "We" have perpetrated a mass exodus from cities and "we" have taken our incomes with us. Thus, Amazon is following us, because that's where at lot of the money "we" have has gone.
Ruraloids don't need cheap Chinese
Roraloids need tools and machines. They need supplies: fluids and blades and gaskets and parts of every conceivable thing. More so than urbanoids that don't do things beyond eating and replacing their electronics and cloths at absurd frequency.
Unless you have evidence that Amazon is somehow failing at their task of feeding market demand and earning profits, perhaps you should reevaluate. Otherwise you'll only diverge further from reality.
I love the fights that people have with Amazon. I buy most everything from them now. The shopping is easy, Prime delivery has saved me hundreds, perhaps thousands. And the big thing - I find what I need.
The big box stores have been failing us for long before Amazon was doing anything other than selling books. And heaven knows I've tried to buy local.
BBS were suffering from Bean Counter disease, where low profit items started disappearing from the Shelves. I remember during the early oughts housing boom,
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The big box stores
And the auto parts stores. And the electronics stores. And the clothing stores. And...
The second thing is that I buy a lot of nuts and bolts stuff.
boltdepot.com baby: I'm on about my 10th order with them this year.
I guess Amazon Prime wants some of that from me.
Pneumatic tube (Score:2)
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Connect every home to a super-sized pneumatic tube system, and you could get everything delivered easily and quickly. I, for one, welcome the tubes. They've already dug up our yards and streets for water, sewer, electric, gas, telephone, cable, fiber optic, etc.
I know it depends on perspective, but if Amazon did it, would that mean the tube system woiuld both suck and blow?
Re: Pneumatic tube (Score:2)
Electricity is often delivered aerially here. Some rural areas don't have any of those other services. Wells and septic tanks. No gas lines. No telephone/cable/fiber, or delivered aerially too.
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Electricity is often delivered aerially here.
???
You mean off-grid solar power? That's an odd way to describe it.
Re: Pneumatic tube (Score:2)
No. I mean power lines on poles, not underground. The point was that some places have nothing buried.
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That's way more plausible than my other theory, which involved directional antennas and lots of dead birds.
Anywhere mountainous has nothing buried, typically, even if it is a large city. That's not a rural-urban divide, necessarily, but rather a combination of feasibility and whether the planners were short-term or long-term thinkers. Long-term, buried lines are more reliable, particularly if you use conduit, so long as you bury them deeply enough. Short-term, overhead lines are a lot cheaper. Until th
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Yes. I live in a hilly area at risk for wildfires. PG&E is a convicted felon. They have buried about 10 miles of power lines out of hundreds of thousands and proudly advertise the good work they are doing on TV. SMH
We do have solar, but not batteries. The batteries also increase fire risk and I would rather have them at the utility than at home.
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Yes. I live in a hilly area at risk for wildfires. PG&E is a convicted felon. They have buried about 10 miles of power lines out of hundreds of thousands and proudly advertise the good work they are doing on TV. SMH
We do have solar, but not batteries. The batteries also increase fire risk and I would rather have them at the utility than at home.
Ahhh, another long suffering PG&E victim..umm I mean customer! HI neighbor, when was your power last turned off because of a little breeze?
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It's been quite a while, actually. Their so called Public Safety Power Shutoff was last in effect in 2018 I believe,for about a day.. We have had notices subsequently but no other PSPS. We have had plenty of unscheduled outages, though. One day a year typical cumulative overall. Typically has to do with drunk drivers knocking down poles. And it takes a random amount of time to fix. As you can imagine, can be a long time when it's on Xmas eve, the middle of the night on a weekend, etc. None of these outages
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It's been quite a while, actually.
You must be in a more populated area than I then. Ours was over the last weekend. We had winds in excess of 9mpg! I could here the PG&E lawyers cackling "sue us will you? payback is a bitch!" We probably average 15 times a year.
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Opps that's mph not mpg.
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That's way more plausible than my other theory, which involved directional antennas and lots of dead birds.
Anywhere mountainous has nothing buried, typically, even if it is a large city. That's not a rural-urban divide, necessarily, but rather a combination of feasibility and whether the planners were short-term or long-term thinkers. Long-term, buried lines are more reliable, particularly if you use conduit, so long as you bury them deeply enough. Short-term, overhead lines are a lot cheaper. Until the fortieth time that an ice storm breaks the wires or wind blows a tree branch down and shorts out the power lines. Then, it starts to get more expensive. And then the one time that the line pops during high winds and the sparks burn down an entire town or two, and suddenly overhead lines are a *lot* more expensive. :-)
You should see what they have to do when an underground power line is hit by lightning. I have some fulgerites that result from that. So rather than fixing the poles, you did up people's yards.
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No thanks. I would rather have shit flowing away from my house than flowing towards it.
I dumped Amazon (Score:2)
I gave up on Amazon Prime since delivery never made their "2nd day" promise.
I've switched to eBay where everything is cheaper (usually a lot cheaper) and most sellers use USPS which for me is as fast as Amazon Prime.
Online (Score:2)
I can't believe there are still stores that cater to walk-in traffic. The future of buildings is to be storage for online delivery orders.
I get same-day from Walmart and have been (Score:1)
For items that are "everyday essentials" there is a Walmart near me that gives me delivery within a few hours, and the annual membership is quite a bit less. The pricing is also less than Amazon - mostly because I am not a Prime member so I don't get "Prime" pricing.