Listening to NPR, a writer for The Atlantic Monthly discusses the future of retail. How we like the presence of quaint shops in our common spaces, but order everything online.
As a last thought, he extrapolates on autonomous cars. How a consumer could use an app to contact a retailer, have them load up the items he/she wants to try and have them come on by.
This seems inevitable as I listen to it. I can only imagine all of the logistical problems this will present. A glut of sample cars; wars between those that use cars and those that can use drones. Companies that specialize in being the middle man, kinda like seamless today.
How is putting an item in a car and driving it over that much different than shipping it via a delivery truck like we do today? Aside from perhaps being faster in some cases?
A vehicle that makes a single delivery is much more expensive per delivery than one that loads up a bunch of items and then delivers them in a sensible route.
Zappos, for example, will happily send you half a dozen [pairs of] shoes in various sizes and styles, let you try them on and ship back whichever you don’t want. So what the OP is proposing is already possible.
Not only is this an argument for elimination of most retail stores but grocery stores as well. Autonomous delivery vehicles issued from central warehouses could delivery all manner of goods in a circuit similar to how package delivery companies operate today, optimizing the route for maximum efficiency. Despite the concern that “our roads would be clogged” with delivery vehicles, this would actually offset traffic to and around shopping centers. Autonomous vehicles using real time GIS traffic data would optimize their routes to avoid heavy traffic. This will result in a sharp reduction in retail jobs, with only those involved in warehouse stocking (for items that can’t easily be handled or packaged for robotic manipulation), and point-of-sale services like fitting, adjustment, or training, but would basically eliminate the clockwatching cashier, shelf stocking, displays, and associated line management.
As an aside, I personally don’t see package delivery by aerial drone ever being viable on a large scale. Setting aside the range and weight limitations of hovering drones, liability concerns, and their vulnerability to wind and weather, just the amount of noise that drones make would become a public nuisance and issue, resulting in municipalities restricting or banning delivery by drone. Baring some kind of science fictional antigravity propulsion, drone delivery en masse just isn’t workable.
Most cities with noise bans exempt commercial activity. Private citizens are restricted from making noise, but trash collectors and lawn-care providers are not limited in how much noise they can make. So commercial drones would be exempt from noise ordinances, and in fact already are. And drones wold have a hard time drowning out over a hundred AC compressors on the grounds of the apartment complex where I live.
Just one of those drones flying within a couple hundred feet of the ground is obnoxious. Dozens of the would be deafening, and regardless of general exemptions for commercial activity–which are hardly absolute as can be seen by manufacturers, processors, and test facilities forced to curtail activity or move facilities due to encroachment of housing developments and population growth–public sentiment would most certainly result in municipal bans for delivery. Municipalities have regulatory authority over non-navigable airspace (below 1,000 feet) with exceptions for licensed airports and similar facilities.
Do away with “big/little box” brick and mortar might make hometown/Mainstreet retail more profitable??
I have previously spoke about the brick and mortar banks slowly dissembling slowly, going to next to nothing, but many have doubts of that. How can it not?
Are they still letting people take photos of checks as deposits?