Last-mile delivery problems are hard. Vaccine hesitancy is real but is often used as a crutch to hide the real lack of costly effort necessary to literally reach the doorstep of every person willing to be vaccinated. Lotteries and Prizes are great to kickstart the drive, but we need specific, costly, non-scalable efforts to achieve our goals of full recovery.
I have desisted from posting my Covid notes, as the days grew grim and the world is inundated with desperation. Stay well, dear reader.
Instead, I will write about Shipping. The pressure of online orders during the pandemic finally got to the more efficient e-commerce firm in the US: Amazon. WSJ reports that Amazon will be suspending its delivery service, Amazon Shipping, which was created as a competitor to FedEx and UPS to ship items from third party businesses to their customers. I argue why.
An economy that has grown beyond belief is the e-commerce delivery market in China. It has become so central to modern Chinese life that the "food-delivery" has been dubbed as one of the 4 great inventions of modern Chinese civilization. For instance, Luckin Coffee (second only to Starbucks in China) has grown on the legs of its delivery business. No other product, not even pizza, exemplifies the need for exceptionally fast delivery need than hot coffee. [...]
Here is an interesting article from the Wall Street Journal about the struggles of scaling Automation at UPS. (An interesting tidbit: UPS says about half its packages are processed through automated facilities today. At FedEx, 96% of ground packages move through automated…
In 2013, a guy who was trying to pitch a company, called DoorBot, that sold security doorbells, went nowhere on Shark Tank, as the sharks rejected his offer. The founder Jamie Siminoff positioned the idea at $7M. Here is the…
For long time e-commerce and operations observers, it was no surprise that Amazon was opening its “shipping” business: It was as predicable as a bowling ball on the lane slowly rolling to the pins. Much earlier, in 2014, Amazon had…
Through the Seattle Times, here is a clip on the history of Amazon Prime. Below, I discuss two points on scaling Prime services. Two Points on Scaling: Scaling Volume: Prime was clearly a way to scale revenues through the volume…