Unhand Her, You Cad

There's that line, sort of, from 1930's cliffhanger serials; "Unhand her, you cad!!" I was watching something else, and I'm not a fan of Bezos anyway, so I missed the piece about the drones. Helpfully, it's now made print (well, sort of). As predicted in these endeavors some time back (I'll leave the spelunking to the reader), Amazon is transforming itself into a Brick & Mortar outfit, just with some Emperor's New Clothes.

In order for 86% (<= 5 lbs.) of deliveries to be made with flying spiders, there have to be warehouses, aka stores, within a fairly small distance of 100% of Amazon's customers. Given technology (battery capacity or internal combustion engine miniaturization) a SWAG on delivery radius is on the order of 30 minutes (60 minutes round trip) flight time. So, 100 mile radius requires ~ 200 mph. A sky full of these flying spiders at faster than (all but raptor style firing platforms) helicopter speed? Not likely. So, lots more warehouse, aka stores, will be needed.

Densely populated areas provide the best bang for the buck, but how does delivery work for apartment buildings? Will a storage box, with one way top hatch have to be built? Who pays for that? How will it be engineered to allow packages, but not rain/snow/sleet/rodents? "Bob, we've got RATS!!!!"

Publicity stunt. Amazon still makes no money, and continues to morph into Wal-Mart, without the parking lot, but lots of humans scurrying around getting widgets. Silly.