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Hot on the heels of Walmart's plans to deliver groceries directly into the fridges of homes with smart locks, Amazon has announced a similar arrangement for package deliveries, called Amazon Key:
Amazon on Wednesday announced Amazon Key, a new program for Prime members that lets delivery people drop off packages inside of customer homes.
To make Amazon Key possible, Amazon has introduced its own $120 internet-connected security camera called Amazon Cloud Cam. Customers who want to participate in the program need to purchase an accompanying "smart" lock to allow delivery people to enter their home. Combined camera-lock packages start at $250.
With the program Amazon is adding what it thinks is a more convenient option than traditional outside drop-off, while also coming up with one solution to package theft which is rampant in some markets.
The obvious questions are whether people will trust a delivery person to enter their home unattended. Amazon is trying to assuage these fears by alerting customers when a delivery is about to happen to allow them to watch it live via their phone.
This really isn't a big deal. They were delivering to the doorstep previously, and now they want to move the delivery by a couple of feet. There's almost no difference.
Also at The Verge.
Previously: Amazon Wants to Deliver Purchases to Your Car Trunk
(Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday October 26 2017, @11:38AM (3 children)
(Score: 3, Insightful) by VLM on Thursday October 26 2017, @02:28PM (1 child)
I buy a lot of stuff from Amazon. Here's what I've seen:
There's a small professional service of dudes in uniforms and vans with the logo on the side and everything and their highest priority is the grocery service which I have almost no experience with. But if you order fresh tomatoes you probably get them from a uniformed dude driving a labeled van. I see them making business deliveries moving in on the peapod turf. Peapod is awesome if you want to keep the office break room fridge stocked with energy drinks and apples.
The overflow of regular packages (here, at this time, essentially all regular packages) is handled by regular joe warehouse worker on his way home from work for extra pay. The pay isn't good and the working conditions are legendarily not good so ...
Its interesting that the economy is such a failure for so many people that unsustainably bad jobs are superficially sustainable because of infinite supply of poverty. That's a meta problem, if the USA economic system didn't suck, amazon's employment policies couldn't suck, so the employees would be able to afford cars built this century and nice clothes etc. There's no inherent reason a dude working in a warehouse has to be dirt poor with all that accompanies being dirt poor.
(Score: 2) by lx on Thursday October 26 2017, @03:10PM
My guess is that it's the problem of an aging population. This kind of wage stagnation coupled lack of inflation started in Japan in the '90s and has reached the US and Europe over the last two decades.
Central banks are desperately trying to raise inflation and failing. The whole inflation/deflation thing turns out to be a symptom and not the cause of the problem. Honestly I don't see a quick way out, short of going all Logan's Run or inviting a new Spanish Flu pandemic to wipe out a large portion of the 60+ generation.
Which I'm not advocating by the way.
(Score: 2) by goodie on Thursday October 26 2017, @04:51PM
That's kinda my experience too in my neighborhood. The guy is nice and does deliveries on Sundays and holidays but he drives a wreck and asks me to sign the cracked screen of his smartphone... I'm not asking for a butler but still, that talks about the state of things when you have to do parcel deliveries. I wonder how much they get per delivery actually... It's the next logical step for the Turks. There's a trend here with Amazon: they start with something digital and then expand it to the physical world. It seems to go a lot smoother than the other way around in terms of acceptance...