Who visits every neighborhood on a daily basis? There’s the postal service, of course, but another group of drivers or distributors on foot come by early in the morning, making their deliveries while most people sleep. Most cities still have a daily newspaper, so why not take advantage of that to bring online orders to residential neighborhoods? That’s what Amazon wants to do in the United Kingdom.
Here in the United States, Amazon founder and CEO Jeff Bezos bought an entire newspaper, the Washington Post. Meanwhile, across the Atlantic, the company that Bezos founded is partnering with a newspaper distributor to deliver and pick up customer packages. These deliveries won’t be right to customer doorsteps just yet, but instead to small local retailers that also happen to receive bundles of newspapers. Amazon will pay the business owners a fee for every package that a customer picks up or drops off on site.
The CEO of Amazon’s newspaper distributor partner, Connect Group, pointed out that this isn’t an exclusive partnership, either: the company could also perform pickup and delivery duties for other retailers as well. These online store deliveries could be an important revenue stream as print newspaper sales decline. While there are other logistics issues (storage and security for packages in tiny corner shops, for example) Amazon seems to think that it’s a useful extension of their existing delivery network.
Amazon U.K. Taps Newspaper Distributor For Same-Day Deliveries [Wall Street Journal]
by Laura Northrup via Consumerist
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