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Originally Posted by qasdfdsaq
Yes but a van also sits around unused much of the time, as it require a manual driver on a salary to operate, further there's costs of fuel, insurance, and all that too, while a drone could also deliver thousands of packages in a year.
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I did factor that in, but you also need to factor in that any reasonably efficient courier operation will have decent logistics and route management systems in place. These are designed to keep the amount of time each vehicle is off road to a minimum, and also to ensure that the route taken by each vehicle is the shortest it can be to encompass all the delivery points.
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Furthermore, said van can do far fewer 30-minute deliveries than it can doing a standard multi-package run that takes several hours.
There's far too many variables to really make a sensible comparison, but the only other company doing 30-minute deliveries right now are Craplin, and they charge around the price of a taxi, because well, they basically use taxis. And even then, those costs are barely more than standard delivery charges if you live close by.
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Actually the point you have made there brings to mind another problem Amazon would have if they are planning to offer this service country wide. They would need at least one depot within 30 minutes flight time of every building they are planning to deliver to. They don't, and a major reason that they can offer lower prices than shops is that they don't have a lot of buildings to rent (or buy), maintain and staff. According to Wikipedia (
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amazon....nd_warehousing), Amazon have seven operational warehouses in the UK, with 3 more planned. I suspect those warehouses cost a lot less to maintain and run than the several hundred smaller warehouses they would need to maintain a 30 minute delivery time to most of the country. They possibly cost less to run than the couple of dozen or so that would be needed to cover the major towns and cities.
The extra warehousing would be an extra cost to Amazon because they don't have those facilities in place. Maplin do not have this extra cost simply because they only offer the service where they have shops nearby, so are paying the cost anyway.