Comment by RandallBrown | Hacker News Reader

Comment by RandallBrown | Hacker News Reader

Whenever I see one of these articles, I can't believe how narrow the author's view of the world is that they can't imagine these drones actually working.

Imagine if they put a small warehouse in a big city, filled with their most commonly sold items in that city. (For now we'll pretend the warehouse/dronepad is on the roof of their Seattle headquarters, right in the center of Seattle)

I can SEE Amazon's buildings from my apartment right now. It's probably a mile or two as the crow (or drone) flies. That seems well within the range of what Bezos talked about for Prime Air. I also have a rooftop deck on my building that only residents can access. It's pretty big and would be a perfect place for a drone landing pad.

There are probably a hundred similar apartment buildings all within a 10 mile radius of Amazon. They would all be able to easily handle drone deliveries from this small, centralized, micro-warehouse.

Can commercial drones handle straight line flying with building sized object avoidance over a space of a couple miles? I think so.

Will they "in a few years" just like Bezos said? Absolutely.

Just because it won't work in rural south dakota or the suburbs of Detroit Michigan, doesn't mean that it won't work somewhere.

Like the author said, Amazon trialed fresh for FIVE years before taking it out of Seattle. What's to say they won't do the same thing with Prime Air?

(Just in case anyone is wondering, I don't work for Amazon)

Small warehouses in big cities still cost a lot of money. Land is expensive in big cities, and even small warehouses are pretty large.

Warehouses -- even small ones -- also need to be able to take goods IN. They need truck-accessible streets, loading docks, and they need staff who store, and then pick/pack/ship your goods. Small warehouses that handle high-turnover goods need even more staff, since they need to constantly replenish themselves (since they're small, and can't just take a hundred thousand units in once a month, and since we're stipulating that the goods are high-turnover and leave the warehouse quickly).

It's expensive. Amazon has wonderful warehousing and distribution, which only goes to show that they aren't actually naïve about how expensive it is. Which goes to show that the drone delivery thing was a publicity stunt.

Too small a warehouse, and you don't deliver the customer satisfaction that is presumably the point of a drone delivery, because a trivial number of goods actually get delivered to customers. (Especially since we're talking very small goods in the first place).

> Small warehouses in big cities still cost a lot of money. Land is expensive in big cities, and even small warehouses are pretty large.

They don't have to be downtown.

Regardless, you're thinking about this the wrong way. As a service that must serve everyone and deliver everything instead of as an opportunistic service, which is a smarter way to approach the problem from a business perspective.

Amazon already has warehouses, fulfillment centers, in several major metro areas.

Let me state that again, because it's hugely important. Amazon already has warehouses in some cities. They have to have their FCs somewhere, and the places where they are, like Seattle, already have a comparative advantage when it comes to fulfillment of commonly stocked items.

This changes the problem dramatically. It transforms it from: buy high priced land in major cities, build FCs there, set up drone operations; to: set up drone operations in a few cities where you already have large, well stocked warehouses, and then pilot the program opportunistically in those cities. Then expand the program to other cities depending on how successful and profitable the pilot program turns out to be.

This is business 101, you leverage what you've already got to mitigate risk and reduce development and acquisition costs.

We have these things called "highways" that let us do this.

Seriously though, every retailer has figured out this problem. Drive around in Brooklyn, Queens and the Newark area and you'll see hundreds (if not thousands) of working warehouses. Hell, the New Jersey turnpike feels like a corridor in the middle of a giant warehouse.

In my city, a fruit and vegetable distribution place setup a small warehouse for restaurant deliveries about 5 blocks from the central business district. It added a little cost, but now he can deliver a case of fruit to a restaurant in like 20 minutes vs. 90.

I would like to point out that all retail stores really are "small warehouses" with registers to handle purchases.

1) It's not that expensive to send a Semi filled with goods several times a day to a small warehouse, again that's the norm.. not the exception in retail.

2) Packages are already being delivered from "small warehouses" with all Amazon orders - every city has UPS/Fedex/USPS distribution warehouses that split the big trucks into smaller trucks that then drive to you. Amazon is trying to use the drones to replace the delivery drivers.

Compromise that's doable with today's tech - Amazon could utilize a network of Amazon Lockers in outdoor public places and have the drones deliver the packages to an opening in the top of the locker which the locker then takes and loads into the right slot. The customers can then pickup the packages at their leisure like any other Amazon Locker. The drones would not need to deliver to every location, just the preset lockers which would be in areas with safe and easy access for the drones.

Land is expensive. In Seattle, they already own a ton of land downtown. Not an issue there.

In other cities I doubt it would be too hard to find some buildings that would let them put a shipping container on the roof stocked with some essentials for a reasonable fee.

Stocking stores is a solved problem in big cities. I don't expect a drone warehouse to carry more than a typical drugstore. They could even partner with local stores for order fulfillment.

Remember, this doesn't have to scale out to all places and all items immediately. This could just start off as a way for tech hipsters in Seattle to order condoms on demand. If it becomes successful, they'll build it out as they need to.

This problem doesn't have to be solves with warehouses. Drones are a solution to the last mile problem. Simply make delivery trucks into mobile drone launching platforms and then Amazon or UPS can drive into a neighborhood and drones will deliver all the packages light enough and the driver will deliver all the heavy ones.

Regarding rural areas, maybe Amazon has two advantages:

1. Last time gas prices went up, many of these rural folks were stranded without food because they couldn't afford the gas to get into town, especially fixed-income older people.

2. There's not as much competition out there. If the local Walmart shuts down because they can't compete with Amazon, the drones might start to look more appealing.

Do kids still play with BB guns ( http://www.dickssportinggoods.com/family/index.jsp?categoryI... ) anymore? just wondering...

Yeah they do, but I've never seen any shooting at the UPS driver.

That's because, should they do so, the UPS driver is just likely to wallop the snot out of them, and if not that then almost certain to call the local constabulary. Neither behavior seems likely to be among the repertoire of a flying publicity stunt.

(And, having myself been raised in rural Mississippi and toted a Daisy air rifle, when at play, throughout most of my childhood -- you'd better believe kids would shoot BBs at Amazon drones they saw flying past! That's the kind of fun even a kid who doesn't shoot at songbirds can enjoy.)

Exactly right. there's a biiig difference between shooting a UPS/Fedex/USPS driver and shooting a drone. Kids I knew growing up wouldn't hesitate, not 1 second, throwing rocks, or shooting something, anything, at a drone... that is, if we had such a thing back then...

these drones will need to have anti-projectile and defensive maneuvering systems from day 1.

I get the same feeling, especially because I know someone working on this and has a small working model already.

Here are a few ideas that could make this work easily. Self driving vans via google plus drones in the back that fly out when they pass the delivery location with the package delivers it and returns to the truck. That is a great starting point and then when drones become better, longer lasting, you start sending them from UPS delivery locations at airports.

This is like that Article about how Amazon is a dumb idea from the 90's. So narrow minded.

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