Amazon has successfully delivered its first parcels in Great Britain, particularly in County Durham. The plot twist: it’s through drones. Here’s the scoop.
In this county, packages weighing less than five pounds and containing daily items like beauty products, bin liners, and cables are being delivered through drones from Amazon’s fulfillment center. Amazon is deploying its most modern model, the MK30.
Customer Rob Shield let Amazon use an Airbnb on his farm for the first test runs, narrating, “Initially, it was a novelty, so we were ordering everything under the sun. Pens, paper, chocolates - anything to make it keep coming."
His parcel orders reportedly arrived in packages the size of shoeboxes, dropped from a height of 12 feet to his front garden.
“We’d have people come just to see it,” he told Ridesharingforum.com.
It’s like a spectacle, like solar eclipse, comets, or the Aurora Borealis.
However, not every customer is happy about how this historic moment of first drone deliveries for parcels are turning out.
There’s this woman who spoke with ridesharing media saying, “I think I’d rather somebody actually handed me my parcel than dropping it into my garden,” with another saying they would “stick to the old way”.
Another resident described the idea of drone deliveries as "nutty as a fruitcake.”
But, Amazon is unfazed by these negativities, saying that everything will be worth it eventually.
David Carbon, the deputy of Amazon Prime Air, stated, "The certainty is people have never told us they want their stuff slower. If you’ve got kids and you want fever medication, you want it. You don’t want to drive to the store.”
They are making it a goal to deliver these parcels as fast as it is in the USA, which only takes around 35 minutes, instead of the two hours in this western European country.
Amazon confirmed it will carry out 10 flights an hour, maximum, to total to up to a hundred deliveries per day on weekdays.
And, this area in County Durham is interesting for those running these deliveries as the landscape here poses challenges.
Dr. Anna Jackson, an associate professor of Geography at the University of Reading told RSF, “A lot of our demand for delivery services are in urban centers. They are very densely populated, very congested. And the reality is [drone deliveries] don’t work well in high-rise buildings.”
She further noted that while there are ideas to develop rooftop deliveries and hubs, "right now we’re not there yet.”
In areas like this, she stated, customers need to be eligible for the delivery through drones. They must have a yard or garden.
In London, drones are being trialed to deliver blood supplies, and the Royal Mail is also using drones to deliver packages to remote areas in Orkney.
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