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Good point. However, it is a huge operational risk to rely on on-demand hires for logistics. In addition, ride-sharing works because humans are moved with a giv
by jsemrau 10y ago
Good point. However, it is a huge operational risk to rely on on-demand hires for logistics. In addition, ride-sharing works because humans are moved with a given market price given by the taxi network. In logistics you compete not only against UPS and FedEx but with Amazon as well. And *mostly free shipping is hard to get cheaper.
- aetherson 10y agoAlso, you know, Amazon are not idiots. They aren't like, "Hey, you know what would be fun? Being bent over a barrel on last-mile shipping so that our profits can go to justify Uber's insane stock price." Amazon is investigating Uber-like delivery options [1]. If they decide that there's anything there (and I'm not totally convinced that there is), they'll build the service themselves and not pay Uber for the privilege. And if the service works well for themselves, you can bet they'll open it up to other people to use for a price, as they have for all of their internal infrastructure projects. [1] Source for this claim: I worked at Flywheel, an Uber competitor. Amazon had a program to have our drivers deliver packages, and got fairly close to acquiring us, before deciding they would rather not. This was a few years ago at this point, information is not current, and I have no idea about the present state of Flywheel, as I do not work there any more.