Brad Ideas - Local Depot - Comments

Interesting

brad — Fri, 11 May 2007 01:02:03 -0700

Though at $12 per parcel it's more still a delivery service than a way to shop. My goal is to make a service that's very cheap (because it doesn't have to do all those home deliveries, and makes use of some existing facility as this service uses existing convenience stores) and also can bundle up items from various vendors to be even more efficient.

Japanese Convenience Stores do it.

Sebastien Bailard — Thu, 10 May 2007 22:59:21 -0700

Japanese convenience stores do something similar:
http://www.japan-guide.com/e/e2278.html

The service is called Takuhaibin. You can order stuff online and pick it up at 7-11, etc. It's part of a larger shipping service which includes shipping luggage from one hotel to another, and so on.

Why do it?

brad — Thu, 12 Apr 2007 14:14:05 -0700

There is not room for a big box in every neighbourhood, not even one, let alone the "standard collection" of Costco/Home Depot/Wal Mart/Barnes and Noble/Dept. Store/etc. Plus add Amazon and the like.

Home delivery is much more labour and truck intensive on the part of delivery company, and for many requires they be home to receive it. At one home I've had, it's not a problem, the area is very safe and they just leave stuff by the door, no signature. However, if they do require a signature as they sometimes do it's a royal pain when I'm not there, and stuff is delayed another day. At another house, leaving valuables by the door is not so workable. And this is for delivery that takes at least 1 day (at high cost) but usually several more. I'm talking about delivery in 2-3 hours, not 2-3 days.

The realization is that walking to local shopping is good. Leaving out the benefit to the environment, traffic and your health, walking to a local depot 1500' away is about 6 minutes, which is faster than a typical car trip to a shopping center. I started realizing this when I had a place with a tiny but nicely stocked set of stores within about 600' -- it's really a lot better by a longshot than the typical suburban arrangement, though shopping centers have more selection and better prices which is how they manage to win.

Sharing a warehouse complex is no big deal, they companies all share delivery companies, and in this case the warehouse system is the delivery system.

There are already systems in

Anon Y. Mouse — Thu, 12 Apr 2007 13:14:45 -0700

There are already systems in place to deliver goods from
multiple companies right to the home -- they're called
the UPS, DHL, FedEx, etc. Why settle for some interim step?
It costs money to maintain a retail location, which would
likely eat up any cost savings gained from your proposal.

Any location with a sufficient population density to support
your proposed local depot will support a big box store.

AIUI, Walmart (and perhaps others) already have online
operations, again with delivery straight to the home, no
intermediate step.

Are you proposing that different companies would share the
remote warehouse? Why would potentially competing entities
want to do that? I doubt they'd entrust their warehouse
operations to a third party, much less one that also services
a competitor.

It's easy to set up straw men and knock them down, but there
are good reasons why the existing retail infrastructure is
the way it is. You'd have to demonstrate very compelling
advantages why business would want to change to your model,
and you've failed to do so.

General delivery

brad — Tue, 10 Apr 2007 12:20:36 -0700

Yes, the post office actually has offered the concept of "general delivery" since almost forever. I presume DHL keeps the savings of not sending out trucks. My vision is a system that's cheap enough, and fast enough, to deliver a gallon of milk if need be. It should work well in urban areas, and in fact could even be adapted to the denser suburban locations, though it's harder to get enough of the population within say, 600 meters of a depot so that they consider it a quick walk. You also want enough volume of orders that it justifies a delivery every few hours rather than just daily, which may never be possible in less dense areas.

They already exist in Europe, after a fashion.

Phillip Helbig — Tue, 10 Apr 2007 06:42:24 -0700

I've never used them myself, since I prefer home delivery
(if there is no-one home, a neighbour in the same house can
accept a delivery and the deliverer will put a note in our
mailbox saying with whom the parcel was left), but for a
while in Germany the post office has set up "package stations"
at various locations. These are lockers and one can collect
one's parcel there with the help of a code (which, one gets by
email or SMS). One can also send parcels as well.

There is even a web page in English:

http://www.dhl.de/dhl?tab=1&skin=hi&check=yes&lang=de_EN&xmlFile=53008

but check out the German version for different graphics:

http://www.dhl.de/dhl?skin=hi&check=yes&lang=de_DE&xmlFile=53008

Local Depot

brad — Mon, 09 Apr 2007 14:43:10 -0700

In yesterday’s article on future shopping I outlined a concept I called a local depot. I want to expand more on that concept. The basic idea is web shopping from an urban warehouse complex with fast delivery not to your home, but to a depot within walking distance of your home, where you can pick up items on your own schedule that you bought at big-box store prices within hours. A nearby store that, with a short delay, has everything, cheap.

In some ways it bears a resemblance to the failed company Webvan. Webvan did home delivery and initially presented itself as a grocery store. I think it failed in part because groceries are still not something people feel ready to buy online, and in part for being too early. Home delivery, because people like — or in many cases need — to be home for it may actually be inferior to delivery to a depot within walking distance where items can be picked up on a flexible schedule.

Webvan’s long term plan did involve, I was told, setting up giant warehouse centers with many suppliers, not just Webvan itself. In such a system the various online suppliers sit in a giant warehouse area, and a network of conveyor belts runs through all the warehouses and to the loading dock. Barcodes on the packages direct them to the right delivery truck. Each vendor simply has to put delivery code sticker on the item, and place it on the conveyor belt. It would then, in my vision, go onto a truck that within 1 to 2 hours would deliver all the packages to the right neighbourhood local depot.