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Bully pulpit works: Amazon says it will start same-day delivery to Roxbury
By adamg on Tue, 04/26/2016 - 3:17pm
BostInno reports the company now plans to eliminate the 02119-sized hole in its same-day delivery service.
Joyce Linehan, an aided to Mayor Walsh, writes the company reversed course after the mayor issued a statement castigating the company for bypassing Roxbury.
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Comments
That's Boston
What about the similar holes in other cities? Does each one need its own squeaky wheel?
Did any other city have a hole?
In the other cities mentioned and mapped in the Bloomberg article, there was a line* beyond which Amazon didn't deliver. There wasn't a donut hole.
* not necessarily a straight line
The DC map is pretty bad
The DC map is pretty bad because the straight line is arbitrary in regards to road conditions/distance from warehouse but looks very very much like the racial maps.
Though, surprisingly, the DC map also omits Capitol Hill
from the delivery area. That's a pretty affluent neighborhood.
Makes sense
Whatever savings they'd get from excluding Roxbury (from a service that surely loses money anyway) aren't worth the bad publicity.
Besides which, Amazon Web Services probably generates enough profit every 30 seconds to cover the loss.
yep ...
AWS is generating billions although their constant reinvestment in facility and features does not mean that any of that is close to massive profit yet.
I've got clients spending $100,000/month just for Amazon S3 storage space alone.
Totally bizarre to live in a world where a former bookseller is gonna rule the IT world and destroy all the other sad cloud computing pretenders. Only Google and Microsoft have a shot and even then they are years behind in feature set compared to what Amazon AWS can deliver today. Strange times ...
This describes Amazon's
This describes Amazon's approach to world domination pretty well
Exactly
Amazon does things that increase its growth and its stickiness to people. And they do the math.
The math presumably told Amazon they didn't want to be in that part of Roxbury right now. Not until they factored in PR.
Amazon Delivers Same Day!?!
Thanks for all the publicity for my new service Boston - Sincerely Jeff Bezos - CEO and Not So Future Bond Villain.
Wait unit he carpet bombs West Roxbury
with drone delivered yellow pages!
did it really work?
Amazon's decision came out several minutes after the mayor's original statement. Amazon's decision was more likely because last week's outrage on reddit than this morning's outrage from the mayor.
Who actually delivers though?
The broader question is who does the actual deliveries?
While Amazon has its own fleet of small van trucks that has been plying other Boston neighborhoods, they still use the US Postal Service for a lot of the last-step deliveries.
I am personally aware that the Needham postal station, for one example, has a crew in at 4 AM on a Sunday just to sort and load Amazon and other package deliveries that have a quick delivery requirement.
So are we talking about same-day or next-day delivery using an Amazon truck, or using the US Post Office. If the latter, they may not have people in on a Sunday in all stations, hence, no deliveries for you?
Let's also keep in mind that FedX Ground, the white trucks with the green and blue "FedX" logo is not owned and operated by Federal Express. Rather this is a franchise option with private carriers using their own vehicles. They are just franchising the name and logo. So if you get stuff FedX Ground, don't expect it to be the same as the actual FedX express service. Rather it's like UPS with a different label.