Hacker News Reader

Comment by alexashka | Hacker News Reader

I hear you. This to me seems like a trivial problem however. Just limit it to X number of packages delivered to your door, per week.

View on HN

Amazon does have a feature where you can pick a day of the week to get all your packages. I don't believe people really use it though, because what's the incentive to wait longer?

That's for people who will be away from home and don't have a secure drop off for their packages.

I'm fairly surprised Amazon doesn't incentivize its use outside of that use case, though. It's presumably cheaper for them to deliver a week's worth all at once, labor wise, and they already do $1 Kindle credits for slower shipping.

When I tried this I was hoping there was some reduction in packaging associated. At least for me, it was just all the same boxes on the same day, instead of one big box, or something reusable/returnable like Fresh.

Right, so just add the incentive... Seems pretty straight forward.

Limited by the government? That would be a nightmare to legislate and enforce.

This would be difficult to enforce, and given commerce laws I'm not sure it would even be legal. That said, you could use some form of congestion pricing for delivery vehicles, but unless those costs are somewhat punitive, any costs would probably just be pushed back into the price of Amazon Prime.

The revenue generated could be used to help pay for other transit and transportation infrastructure though, so on the whole could be quite positive.

Amazon would fight that tooth and nail, and very likely win.

X number of packages would lock in inefficiencies. X number of deliveries would promote efficient delivery (at the expense of timeliness).

Amazon tries to encourage this by using a "delivery day" for all your weekly deliveries to come. They need to incentivize it a bit harder I think with free digital content. If I could rent a movie from prime (not something new but let's say original Matrix) in exchange for using the prime delivery day option then I probably would. Otherwise they are relying on people to realize that constant deliveries are a problem and then sacrifice existing conveniences they have for that problem.

Maybe that's why they don't "fix" the Amazon Logistics service. Force you to get all deliveries when you are home and you might as well pick a time slot dor that.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com