Last mile, same day delivery. I used the "last mile" concept used by the telecom/cable television industry. I did not post it but my thoughts were that we would read about LMSDD in the mainstream media sometime in the next six months or so.
Wow, talk about a surprise. In yesterday's New York Times there was an article on the very subject. My wife pointed it out in the Sunday edition of The Dallas Morning News where it had been re-printed. Here is the story at the NYT:
As the holiday shopping season gets underway, same-day delivery has become a new battleground for e-commerce.
For all the sophisticated algorithms and proprietary logistics software involved, many services come down to someone like Fermin Andujar, who finds himself racing to a store, scanning the aisles for the requested items, buying them and rushing them to the customer.
According to eBay’s job description, he is a “valet,” dispatched on Manhattan streets as a personal shopper on a bicycle or in other cities in a car.
The app for eBay Now, the company’s local shopping service, promises that valets will complete a shop-and-drop-off not just in the same day but “in about an hour,” a timetable crucial to the company’s intensifying efforts to one-up Amazon in the delivery game.
It wasn’t so long ago that overnight delivery seemed amazing enough. Then Amazon started building huge warehouses — what it calls “fulfillment centers” — near major cities to be, in a spokeswoman’s words, “as close to customers as possible.” With 40 such centers in the United States encompassing more than 80 million square feet of storage space and employing 20,000 full-time workers, Amazon offers same-day delivery in 11 cities.
EBay, which last month announced plans to expand eBay Now to 25 cities, and other businesses, including Google’s nascent shopping service and start-ups like Deliv, have a different model: Use existing stores or “retail partners” as distribution centers and beat Amazon in the race against the clock.
I think I first blogged, several years ago, about neighborhood Wal-Mart stores becoming re-distribution centers. When pizza is being delivered for a buck or so, someone is going to make a lot of money charging $8 to $10 for same day delivery.
I still like my idea, the old "milk-run circuit."
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