Nothing can stop the United States Postal Service from delivering your stuff, and nothing can stop Amazon from trying to take over the retail world. Turns out, the ultimate “government program” and the “top retailer” are a match made in commercial heaven.
For decades. the postal service would not deliver on Sundays. In recent years, they even considered stopped Saturday delivery. Then Amazon showed up, and suddenly postal workers are coming in on weekends to make sure you get your Amazon stuff … sometimes on the same day.
“It’s a well-kept secret that the USPS often delivers, particularly the last leg, for UPS and other shipping services. But now Amazon is beginning to turn directly to the postal service, often bypassing other shippers altogether. And now they are even delivering groceries.”, states New York City based Real Estate developer Roman Temkin.
In major metro areas such as NYC and San Francisco, Amazon customers are seeing postal workers arrive, some well before daybreak, delivering groceries and other perishable items.
The post office calls this “leveraging our infrastructure…” but customers are calling it a huge PR win and the beginning of a sea change in how the world buys … well, anything. A few years back many professional prognosticators were singing a death dirge for USPS, now the massive government agency has hitched its wagon to the massive demand generated by Amazon. Email reduced their workload. Jeff Bezos redefined it.
Since the post office is already going to every address in the country at least six days a week, it’s an easy, logical step for innovators like Amazon to take advantage. The combination has been so successful that now the USPS is looking for more e-commerce connections.
While these intentions signal a trend, it’s doubtful either entity could find a better match to break this new ground. The USPS has the best infrastructure to get from here to there, particularly door-to-door, and Amazon, of course, has incredible volume requiring delivery seven days a week. The postal service’s previous PG got this ball rolling, opening up to 7-day delivery. Now his successor is continuing and expanding, giving the public more of a good thing. That’s a winning strategy.
