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A few weeks ago, I was driving to my remote farm in California. Several miles down the dirt road, I came upon a disabled UPS truck. I asked the driver if he needed any help. He said he had a flat tire and was waiting for a tow truck. As I was about to take off, he said, “Wait, let me give you your package!” He handed me a lightweight padded envelope. I ripped the top off and pulled out a single roll of Teflon tape. We looked at the tape, then looked at each other and burst out laughing at the absurdity of the situation. That was his only delivery in the area that day. When you combine the handling, driver time, overhead costs, and truck repairs, that delivery probably cost about 1,000 times the value of the item being delivered. Sure, I felt bad about this particular delivery. But social and environmental issues aside, what happened from 2010 to 2020 that made online shopping a guilt-free on-demand experience? It’s simple: Automation. The logistics arms race This concept didn’t exist prior to 2010. In the early 2000s, e-commerce was growing quickly, but mostly linearly. Consumers shopped online for some things, but the convenience of in-store shopping still won out most of the time. The absurd idea that products could be shipped for free from anywhere to anywhere in one or two days — and returned for free — became the expectation over the course of the decade. Thank you, Zappos! Vecna Robotics Raises $50M to Scale Logistics Automation Business Amazon’s acquisition of Kiva Systems in 2012 set off a logistics arms race, as retailer after retailer realized that logistics wasn’t just a cost center, but also a key competitive advantage. Convenience drives everything. Toward the end of the […]