Wall Street Journal reports that Amazon has signed contracts with Apartment building owners and managers in order to install 850,000 locker units in apartment complexes.
One of the challenges that remain in last-mile deliveries is “matching” delivery times with guaranteed time windows. Say, you need a delivery to be made between 1-3 pm on Tuesday. It is hard for a firm (i.e., expensive to accomplish, not mathematically hard) to make sure that the delivery occurs exactly in that window.
Having some select products in stock at lockers in apartment complexes will address some of the “matching” problems. This is effectively like the consignment model in the medical devices industry. The devices are physically held at hospitals, but owned by device companies until they are “pulled” for scheduled surgeries. Information on scheduled surgeries helps the medical devices company to pre-position the devices.
Similarly, with careful tracking of the shopping cart, or even click-tracking information, I think Amazon can “pre-deliver” products for orders. When ordered, Amazon can direct consumers to locker-locations with the specific inventories, especially express orders. What a consumer sees is an extraordinary speed of order fulfillment. Who needs a store then, except for experiential shopping?