this post was submitted on 06 Jun 2025
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Amazon announced using drones in 2014. In pop culture, drone delivery is like an assumed common practice. Yet fucking nobody gets their packages delivered by drone. It's been over a decade.
These robots are vaporware. Amazon will get a stock bump and that's the whole point.
Yeah, humans regularly deliver stuff wrong on our street. There is no way robots will manage. I get packages for both by neighbours and they get mine more often than correct deliveries and one of my neighbours is a business.
Stop redirecting them. Make it cost them.
Tell your neighbors to file an “it arrived late” or “it didn’t arrive” complaint. Get two and send one back. Their fault for being shit companies.
If something is delivered to you by mistake, it’s not your responsibility to fix the mistake, you just got free stuff.
If it goes through USPS, it might be a federal offense to open stuff delivered via USPS, but is that true of third party parcel delivery? Almost certainly not, because USPS is a government org and those third party shit delivery companies aren’t..
So now any package that’s delivered to me by anyone other than USPS.. it’s mine now, and I open it to see if I want whatever trash my neighbors are buying.
I used to try to fix the problem.. but then I realized it’s NOT MY PROBLEM.
At my old workplace we ended up getting like a thousand toilet seats delivered to us. We were a web publishing firm.
Perhaps it wasn't an accident... 😂
What makes you think you can't have individualized instructions for harder to reach addresses? After the first failure it's pretty trivial to go out and fix it. Google does far more work maintaining maps and directions services.
Vs having a new delivery guy get confused every other week?
What you just described is humans causing the issue, drone delivery would absolutely solve your problem.
The drone's only as good as its software, the map it's using, and the address data it's given. All of which were created by fallible humans.
Ain't it fun having turtles all the way down?
43.9454776, -123.5393014
^ no address, GPS is very very precise.
When you order something, do you express where you want it sent in coordinates or as an address? You can't assume that the device's coordinates at the time the order is made correspond to where the order is supposed to be sent, even if the device gives coordinates. Plus, they're either not precise enough (could encompass the yard of the house next door, or just the snowbank at the edge of the property) or too precise ("drop this in the center of the roof because that's where the coordinates are"). You'd need software capable of parsing building layouts well enough to figure out where the main entryway is and leave the parcel there, or you'd have to require that people interested in receiving deliveries by drone put a beacon where they want the drone to drop stuff.
Beacons are the simplest solution, but they immediately put Amazon in a position where most people won't care enough to set them up.
Even as pitched, you still have to print out a QR code and staple it to your front lawn for every package. Presumably, they want you to be home for it since it's dropped out in the open and might bounce into the street.
Amazon's drone delivery is trash, you're correct. But eventually it will be significantly better than humans, input gps location and the product will be at that exact location give or take 1 foot
Take a look at ziplines upcoming drone delivery service for instance, it will be significantly better than Amazon's and will be way better than a human delivery driver.
It's been ten fucking years. They are one of the top five companies in the world. What are we waiting for here?
All of the investors that originally paid into the idea have already made their money. There is no reason to continue the project.
Can you point to deliveries that actually use any of that?
Down voted for the obvious observation. A drone just needs to get explicit instructions ones a report is filled and it won't be an issue. Google does more work on Google maps IMO.
That's a great point. Where are all those delivery drones? Lol
You are wise
Amazon just rolled out their first production drone delivery SSD site in Phoenix. It's sorta shit though.
Zipline is way more interesting and I cant wait for them to go live in my area.
Airspace rules are a huge factor there. I see delivery robots on the sidewalk often enough though.
I suspect most companies are still waiting out the testing and waiting for costs to be reduced.