Amazon Driving Towards Same-Day Delivery Operations

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 Shopping In The Future

Local retailers are about to be massively disrupted by Amazon's new goal is to get stuff to you with same-day shipping. In the future as soon as you hit the Buy button, your order will be picked by robots and on the way to you.

The Financial Times’ Barney Jopson reports that Amazon is now enacting a major shift in the company’s operations. Amazon’s grand strategy has been to set up distribution centers in, low-cost states and then ship stuff to people in more populous, high-cost states. When you order items from Amazon, for instance, it gets shipped to California from one of the company’s massive logistic centers in Kentucky or Nevada.

Also, now that Amazon has agreed to collect sales taxes, the company can legally set up warehouses right inside some of the largest metropolitan areas in the nation. This is essential to the company's new goal is to get stuff to you immediately—as soon as you hit the Buy button, your order will be picked by robots and on the way to you. (Disclosure: 33rd Square participates in Amazon Associates, an "affiliate" advertising plan that rewards websites for sending customers to the online store. This means that if you click on an Amazon link from our site and you end up buying something, Amazon will send 33rd Square a small percentage of your final purchase price.)

Farhad Manjoo at Slate writes that Amazon's new strategy will dramatically impact local bricks-and-mortar retailers.

Physical retailers have long argued that once Amazon plays fairly on taxes, the company wouldn’t look like such a great deal to most consumers. If prices were equal, you’d always go with the “instant gratification” of shopping in the real world. The trouble with that argument is that shopping offline isn’t really “instant”—it takes time to get in the car, go to the store, find what you want, stand in line, and drive back home. Getting something shipped to your house offers gratification that’s even more instant: Order something in the morning and get it later in the day, without doing anything else. Why would you ever shop anywhere else?

Amazon already can print books on demand books thereby reducing the need for physical inventories and this is causing a major disruption with traditional publishers.  Along with their Kindle eBook platform, the company has already changed the book business.  With same-day delivery other retailers will really start to feel the pinch.

Furthermore, with the automation introduced by Amazon to the shopping process, a large corresponding job-loss effect will be a result.



SOURCE  Slate

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