

"The Delivery Wars": Robots vs. Drones vs. People - nickbilton
http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/12/08/disruptions-at-your-door-in-minutes-delivered-by-robot/
&quot;The Delivery Wars,&quot; are coming, where mini robots, jet-powered drones &amp; the pizza delivery guy, are all racing to your frontdoor.
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bsirkia
The biggest question for me is if it will be cheaper to have same day or same
hour delivery by drone than just walking or driving to the store and buying
it. I use Amazon now because for almost every single item, Amazon is the
cheapest place to buy it and I'm willing to wait a day or two to save 10-20%
than if I bought it somewhere locally. If getting a drone to fly it out to me
costs an extra 10-20% on the item, that basically negates the value of using
Amazon to me.

Articles like this also beg the question, why doesn't Wal-Mart do delivery
right now? If pizza can do it, why doesn't Wal-Mart have delivery guy at each
location that fulfills local orders from Wal-Mart.com? Either 1) They've never
even though of that (not likely) or 2) they evaluated that option and figured
out it wasn't economical. I doubt having a drone swarm is going to be cheaper
than paying some teenager minimum wage to drive around in his car delivering
stuff (at least anytime soon).

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gte910h
Can you operate a drone cheaper than 56.5c a mile? If so, it's a better deal.

The point to point nature of drones make in city delivery incredibly
attractive

I can't see many years being required to beat that.

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toomuchtodo
That mileage cost doesn't take into account human labor.

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gte910h
And pizza places don't really take that mileage cost into account always
either. It's often flat per delivery, etc

But it's a very good floor. Higher may still be valuable, but lower than that
almost certainly is

