If Amazon can have delivery drones, we want them too, says Walmart Mega-retailer Walmart has reportedly asked America's Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) for permission to test out the use of drones for picking up and dropping off goods. The chain, as American as apple pie and union busting, has been testing drone delivery systems indoors but now wants permission to try the hovering …
Multi-story flats aren't so common in the USA. From http://www.census.gov/hhes/www/housing/census/historic/units.html the year 2000 figures:
60.3% single-family, detached
5.6% single-family, attached (i.e. terrace & townhouse)
7.6% mobile homes
So almost 3/4 of housing has a plausible front door already, and these houses might be better customers anyway (mixture of rich urban and remote suburban/rural, so either way happy to pay extra to avoid visiting store). And if drone deliveries really take off (boom! boom!) then bigger apartment blocks might elect to fit a communal landing pad, like a private version of the automated parcel collection points.
Good point, and to a Yank, the number sounds about right. High density living is less common.But it certainly exists, and the solution of a common drop off point - say at he front office - may be the ticket.
But the question I think is more important is - what happens when a drone malfunctions and falls on your head?
"15th floor flat"
Why does everyone keep saying that? Fuck those those flat dwellers. Just because a solution isnt universally applicable dosent mean its not worthwhile - postmen didnt refuse the idea of "bicylcle" just because some people live in the hebrides.
No, this idea is unfeasible for a whole other bunch of reasons...
Anyhow the tower blocks can just have a drone delivery zone on the roof surely?
Walmart also wants to test out drones that deliver purchases from the store to a car in its car park,
I believe (after seeing most of the customers as said store) that this so they don't have to push the cart out as they waddle to their car.
Disclaimer: I don't step foot in their stores as I find the crap they sell is sub-par even to most of the junk stuff on Amazon or E-bay. Not all is junk on Amazon or E-bay but a helluva lot is.
It's not laziness. It's speed and efficiency. Walmart stores are quite large. Just walking about takes a while. Then the bagging, the checkout queue, waking back to the lit, getting turned around, dodging loons on mobiles... It's a lot easier to call ahead with the order, park in a predetermined spot, pop the boot, and wait. An hour affair now reduced to a few minutes. Win.
... and the difference between that and the Grocery "Click and Collect" services which supermarkets already offer, instead of delivery, is what exactly?
Tesco does it in the UK, Walmart's already testing it in the US.
Peter Schiff warned of this situation back when Wallyworld started raising wages. He said that they would become unprofitable and they have. We have been buying cheap goods made in China for many, many moons now and giving the Chinese paper dollars in exchange for the products they have laboured over. Walmart has been the single largest buyer and reseller of those goods. The United States is not doing two vital things: we are not producing enough goods of our own, and we are not saving any money. Both are necessary to a working economy. Keynes was a fool.
You beat me to it... if you need drones to to that, your depots aren't run properly. In one of my former lives (15-20years back) I was involved in designing and building half a dozend new depots for Lidl and upgrading half a dozend older ones. They didn't even need GPS or CCTV for that, I'm pretty sure anyone suggesting something like drones would have been shown the door.
This looks more like seeking attention or a desperate groping for new ideas, possibly a bit of both.
I can't wait until all of this merch is flying through the air waiting to be picked off. Not to mention some handy electronic components.
Initially, only expensive items are going to be worthwhile to ship via expensive drone service. This makes capturing them highly lucrative. I can't wait for the fun to begin.
And it makes less and less as time progresses. The trend these days, at least in the USA, has been towards subscriptions to prosaic things like toilet paper and coffee, and then they bring you other things while they have the box open and a relationship going. Target and Amazon are really pushing this angle a lot.
But I can't see how on earth (get it?) it makes any sense for a drone to be hauling 36 rolls of wiping paper across town to be left in the rain outside my door. It's a low margin product and it would take a heck of a substantial drone to move it. My favorite visualization is some small rotored craft hauling a huge, unwieldy package of paper goods in high winds and being carried away like some storm debris from the Wizard of Oz.
There isn't much in a Walmart that costs more to purchase than it would cost to deliver by drone. The drone itself would be a take down target more than somebody wanting to snag it's payload. You'd get a nice set of Li batteries and a copter that would need a new control board and a tracker-ectimy, but somebody will be selling a kit on eBay to "refurbish" an "acquired" Wally-Drone.
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