Amazon’s “Prime Air” package drone, which it convinced Charlie Rose and 60 Minutes would soon be delivering packages right to your front door.
Did you catch the Cyber Monday silliness that Amazon wrought?
Apparently, the online retail giant had even the venerable Charlie Rose convinced that it was deploying an army of package-carrying drones to make same-day delivery available to the masses.
Well, whether or not the stunt was designed to captivate 60 Minutes audiences and keep the buzz churning throughout the week (looks like I’m buying right in!), there was a great snippet in this Wired write up that pretty much encapsulates the niche that same-day couriers occupy and how we distinguish ourselves from the likes of UPS and FedEx:
The point here is that same-day delivery is expensive because it requires a fundamentally different logistics model. Amazon and every other big retailer relies mainly on a “hub-and-spoke” model of distribution. A large central warehouse serves as a hub from which orders travel in different directions, or “spokes.” A typical Amazon order will go from a distribution center — the Amazon hub — to a UPS or FedEx sorting facility (another hub), from which they are then divvied up among trucks to make local deliveries.
Same-day delivery, on the other hand, requires a point-to-point model. In the hub-and-spoke model, the additional steps of connecting with a same-day shipper take too much time to actually make a delivery on the same day. Instead, merchandise must travel straight from its origin to the customer, which at any kind of distance becomes deeply inefficient.
On a large scale, this inefficiency is difficult to remedy, but for individual couriers there are tremendous efficiencies to be found.
And by creating this efficiency, we create value for our clients.
I just hope we can all be as creative (and effective) as Amazon in our marketing efforts!
