The death of mail order

I got a parcel from Amazon with some books this week. Of course I was at work when the parcel got delivered, so I had to drive to the pickup center yesterday after work to get it. The pickup center is in some industrial area, hard to reach, especially in the evening rush hour. And it is surprisingly badly organized, with just two people at the counter who probably don't have much to do during the day, and then get overwhelmed between 5 pm and closing time. What a hassle, it definitely makes me want to order less from Amazon.

Which made me think that this might be the reason why many of those dot.com business idea of the internet as "the world's largest mall" never took off. Modern ordering systems via the internet are nice enough, but the actual delivery of goods is stuck solidly in the middle of the last century.

All over the western world the number of households is growing faster than the number of people, that is more and more people live alone or in much smaller family units. Also the female work force participation has gone up a lot during the last 50 years. The nuclear family with dad going to work and mom staying at home during the day is now the exception, not the rule. If you ring the door bell of a random private address during the day to deliver a parcel, chances are that nobody is home.

But delivery of parcels, from mail order or private, simply hasn't evolved in spite of these facts. So very often people have to pick up their parcels themselves. That used to be relatively easy at the local post office, but nowadays the postal system has often "restructured" to centralize parcel pickup somewhere farther away from where you live. That is more cost effective for the post, but less convenient for the customer. But of course if you have to go out and drive far to pick up your mail order, you might as well buy in a shop, as you lost the convenience of getting your order delivered to your place.

There must be technical solutions to this problems. For example much larger mail boxes for parcels, complete with scanner, handing out a receipt to the delivery man, whether he be post office, UPS, or FedEx. But it is hard to see who would push for such a system. The people who'd profit most from it, like Amazon, are not involved in the actual delivery, and thus would probably not want to pay for it. Maybe the big breakthrough for internet mail order will come with a company that does the delivery itself, and comes up with a cost effective *and* convenient system to deliver the goods. Until then, we either have to live with bad delivery, or just forget about mail order.
- posted by Tobold @ 8:15 AM Permanent Link