Amazon has a reputation for some extremely fast shipping deliveries, having announced testing of 1-hour delivery for shipments just earlier this year via drone deliveries called Amazon Prime Air, for certain items to be delivered within the hour in specific locations where the shipping option would be supported, if they can get the government to approve the use of drones over U.S. airspace for e-commerce. Now the WSJ reports that Amazon is going to be setting up deliveries by bike messenger for items requested and paid for in the one-hour shipping option for purchases within New York City. Having read this, is anyone else having memory flashes of watching that movie Premium Rush? No? I must be the only one.
The bike messengers will apparently be setting up shop and running the operations out of Amazon’s West 34th street warehouse, where Amazon has reportedly retrofitted the building to hold a lounge for the messengers to relax and wait in between deliveries. For now Amazon is merely doing Time Trial testing to see how fast the messengers can make it to certain addresses around the city, snap a photo and send it, and then return to the warehouse destination. The bike messengers are said to work shifts that last around 8 hours and will receive a $15 an hour pay wage, which is none too shabby for racing around the city delivering packages on a bike, but we suppose that also depends on how many hours they would end up working a week. The new service will be called Amazon Prime Now, a faster version of their already speedy Amazon Prime shipping service which gives consumers delivery of items in one or two business day’s time. The idea behind this delivery option for consumers is a way for Amazon to better compete with local retailers where people have that instant gratification of buying something as opposed to ordering online.
All of this actually seems pretty cool and it’s almost a wonder as to why Amazon hasn’t thought of doing this before, at least for deliveries in certain major metropolitan areas where bike messengers are actually a thing. Bike messengers have been around for years and it seems like this could have easily been worked up a few years ago. In any case, for now this is just something that Amazon could have in the works but Amazon themselves haven’t officially announced anything yet. It’s also going to be an experimental delivery option, and even if it ended up getting a full launch it wouldn’t be everywhere, just likely places like New York City, San Francisco, Seattle etc.