- Amazon is trialing 30-minute deliveries
- They’ll be available to Prime and non-Prime members in just two cities
- This may be the ultimate impatience service
Good things come to those who wait…30 minutes. That’s the promise of a new Amazon delivery service, the retail giant is trialing in Seattle, Washington, and Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.
Folks living in those bustling cities can score ultra-fast deliveries of necessities like milk, eggs, produce, toothpaste, cosmetics, pet treats, diapers, and over-the-counter medicines.
But wait, there’s more. You can also order 30-minute deliveries of less-essential items like electronics, chips, dips, and “seasonal items.”
Prime members pay a $3,99 per delivery surcharge, which is nothing compared to what non-Prime members will shell out: $13.99 per order.
Look, I’m not gonna lie, this is getting ridiculous. Are we that impatient that we cannot wait more than half an hour to hold, use, and consume? How desperately do you need that laptop or those headphones? Are we so lazy that we cannot hop in a car, on a bike, or take a nice walk to retrieve the milk or eggs we desperately need to make our holiday cookies?
This is not about people who are housebound and cannot get out to buy necessities. Amazon Prime ($139 / £95 a year), which promises two-day delivery, is pretty good for them, and with proper planning, you can have all the necessary supplies at your doorstep long before you reach that “30 minutes!!!” emergency.
Limited for now but will you wait?
To be fair, Amazon is only testing this service, and to, perhaps, keep the environmental impact low, is only using facilities, according to a release on the experiment, “designed for efficient order fulfillment, strategically placed close to where Seattle- and Philadelphia-area customers live and work.”
Amazon’s new efforts remind me a bit of the failed dot-com-boom company Kozmo, which promised one-hour deliveries. Amazon was even an investor, but Kozmo flamed out by 2001.
For me, though, that only proved that a tiny startup couldn’t scale to meet what I assume was significant demand. You see, the advent of Amazon Prime and two-day delivery did not create our impatient society, at least not all by itself.
It was built on the sturdy infrastructure of the Internet and Broadband, which put information at our fingertips. Amazon made that digital promise manifest in the real world through two-day (often one-day) deliveries. Many other retailers, like Walmart, Target, and Best Buy, followed suit.
Everything we do now tells us that waiting is for chumps or people without means. Even if implied (or inferred) more than said, it’s not a good message.
Waiting is for other people
When our impatience is always met with instant gratification, we will look for that everywhere, and will push, for instance, for answers from real and virtual people in a second, whether or not they’re the right ones.
Even AI knows (or at least the people who build it) that deeper, more thoughtful answers come from models that take the time to conduct extensive research.
30-minute deliveries are not the end of the world, but it is another crack in the foundation of a thoughtful and patient society. If this experiment succeeds, Amazon will spread 30-minute deliveries across the US and then around the globe. We will get hooked. We will stop appreciating the magic and assume that this is the norm. Our anger will spike when deliveries take an hour or most of the day.
We’ll stop focusing on the problems that do need our attention and sit there, wondering where the hell our chips and dip are.
What a world.
There will, by the way, be the option to tip drivers who hurried to ensure you received your package within that 30-minute window. I just hope that when the driver arrives, they offer you a tip in the form of some pearls of wisdom: “Patience is bitter, but this passion fruit sure is sweet.”
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lance.ulanoff@futurenet.com (Lance Ulanoff)
