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That was my first reading as well. I also envisioned tiny drones delivering hot dogs or single beers. But I realized they're probably talking about a much bigge
by randomdrake 10y ago
That was my first reading as well. I also envisioned tiny drones delivering hot dogs or single beers. But I realized they're probably talking about a much bigger need that arises when an event occurs.
I worked in catering and behind the scenes for large events in some big stadiums. A huge part of stadiums and venues is devoted to storage for inventory of things: food, beverage, apparel, merchandise, cleaning supplies, toilet paper, and so on.
When a big game or event occurs, you need to have tens of thousands of t-shirts, thousands of rolls of toilet paper, thousands of hotdogs, hundreds of kegs, and more.
The logistics, manpower, and square footage behind the delivery, storage, and receipt of these goods is no small thing.
Rather than knowing you're going to want 45,000 T-Shirts on Sunday and ordering, receiving, handling, and storing that inventory ahead of time, the AFC would simply move into place at an appropriate time and delivery would be able to occur as soon as the AFC arrived.
You wouldn't need to store hundreds of thousands of "things," as the day before the event, you would be able to have the AFC parked at your location, with the inventory that would've otherwise been shipped to you and stored onsite, and you can simply unload to the appropriate points of usage or sale.
It would be akin to simply unloading it from the "truck" and putting it where it needs to be used for the day or the next day. This is what occurs for smaller events and at smaller venues and having a massive "truck" to unload from, with automated unloaders, would be quite an interesting evolution to this large scale problem.
Keep in mind this is helping out for events that are already planned that have a well understood set of needs. The possibilities for events that are not planned, like disaster relief, or humanitarian aid, would also be very interesting applications.
"Floating warehouse" not just "floating store."