When I was a kid, I'd walk out the front door every Tuesday and bring in glass bottles of fresh milk from our porch. Then supermarkets and single-use containers planted a dead-end sign on our milkman's route. Cold efficiency always wins, I guess; see you at Trader Joe's, vitamin D. And what happened to milk happened to all sorts of other things that once arrived at our doorstep-when was the last time your doctor dropped by for a house call? Home delivery increasingly became a quaint relic, until the pizza guy was the last man standing on the stoop.
Well- ding-dong- it's back, as a smarter, more efficient, mobile-driven process. Everything we can conceive is going to an on-demand model, made possible by the combination of always-connected hardware and software that knows where everything and everyone is, all the time.
Just look what's already possible. I can tap an icon and flowers from BloomThat are in my hands within 90 minutes. I tap another and Instacart rolls up with a bag from Whole Foods. If I don't feel like cooking, Munchery will ferry over dinner prepared by a personal chef-healthy and delicious and less expensive than the sesame beef from the Chinese place up the street. Washio will deliver my laundry. Zeel will send a masseur. Oh, damn, all that tapping made me drop my phone. No problem, iCracked will rush right over to fix my shattered screen.
This might sound like another Silicon Valley laziness bubble, but it's more than that. On-demand service and delivery is booming right now because it's finally efficient to connect real-world objects and people via the Internet. It's driven by the expectation that we should be able to immediately acquire anything we want using our portable devices. If you want to hear a song or watch a movie, you fire up an app, right? This is just applying that same expectation to the physical world.
The smartphone has become an all-in-one ordering tool, payment system, and fulfillment service. It connects customers with suppliers and inventory while tracking the precise location of everyone and everything involved in a transaction. Wreck on the highway? The phone will automatically reroute your dryer sheets so you aren't paying your driver to sit in traffic. Android and iOS turned idling engines into Uber fleets and preexisting grocery stores into ad hoc distribution centers. As a result, desire is now directly linked with gratification.
Google Shopping Express may be the best example. Google has been tracking in-store inventories for more than four years to deliver local shopping results. So it already knew where stores were and what was in them. It also knew where potential customers were and what kinds of things they wanted. All that disparate data became easy to link up thanks to mobile phones that made real-time location tracking of customers, inventory, and delivery fleets possible.
Place a GSE order and it goes out to teams of shoppers, who fetch items from the shelves. (And yes, Google knows where items are in the stores too.) One person may be assigned to Target, while another spends all day at Costco. Fulfilled orders zip off to a hub and then to delivery drivers, who fan out across the city. Because Google Maps knows the streets and traffic conditions, it plots efficient routes. It's the traditional hub-and-spoke model, but Google-style.
Yet it doesn't take a Google to pull this off. Instacart will shop at the store of your choice and, unlike Google, will bring you perishable items. It's the same principle: The software connects people who want to buy goods and labor with those who want to sell it. It is remarkably efficient-more so than standing in line at Whole Foods.
Which reminds me. I've got a great idea for a new app, and you look like you could use some fresh milk.
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