Mail Pattern Building
Let’s begin today in the small, rural town of Bemidji, Minnesota, a place that seems a world away for most city slickers. But it turns out we all have something in common. Boxes. More specifically, Amazon boxes. But the pile of Amazon boxes is a bigger problem in many out of the way places that depend on the USPS to handle last mile delivery. The fire marshall in Bemidji recently visited the local post office “because the Amazon packages were stacked precariously high.” Locals have seen their other mail delayed by days. And thanks to a package deal Amazon swung with the postal service, the system is breaking down. At least the mail carriers are… “Dennis Nelson, a veteran mail carrier, said he got so frustrated watching multiple co-workers ‘breaking down and crying’ that he staged a symbolic strike earlier this month outside the post office where he has worked for more than 20 years. ‘I have to do something,’ Nelson said. ‘It feels like we should be wearing shirts that say ‘USPS: Brought to you by Amazon.com.'” WaPo (Gift Article): A rural post office was told to prioritize Amazon packages. Chaos ensued.
+ While small town post offices are still contending with Amazon packages, in more and more places, Amazon is handling the shipping on their own. There are vans crawling through my neighborhood day and night. Apparently this is not unique. Let’s check the box score. “Amazon will deliver more packages in 2023 than anyone.” Amazon Takes the Delivery Throne From UPS and FedEx. (In the business, we call this delivering a smackdown.)
+ “Amazon is best known as a retailer, but going into 2024, Amazon is better understood as a massive logistics operation with a vestigial retail operation strapped to its back. Much in the way that it sells cloud computing to other firms with AWS, Amazon rents out its physical logistical capacity — more than 500 million square feet of warehouse space as of 2021, more than a million employees in the United States, and globe-spanning systems to streamline supply chains — to third-party sellers, who account for a majority of products purchased on Amazon.” John Herrman in NY Mag: What If Amazon Delivered Everything You Order From Anywhere? The more they ship, the more efficient they get, and the more you’ll use them. Then they’ve really got the whole package. This question becomes less hypothetical every day.
