“Apple Inc. is offering same-day delivery in the San Francisco Bay Area. Analysts don’t think it will alter the Mac maker’s strategy for brick-and-mortar locations, but could there be another goal with this initiative?” Louis Bedigian writes for Benzinga. “”
“Dan Miller, senior analyst and founder of Opus Research, thinks that Apple is definitely keeping an eye on Amazon.com, Inc.,” Bedigian writes. “‘Amazon has been setting the standard on retail logistics,’ Miller told Benzinga. ‘In a funny way they’ve been calling the shots ever since Amazon Prime added all these refinements, like the button and putting packages in people’s cars. Every retailer, whether it’s Target or Best Buy, is recognizing that customers will gravitate toward the retailer that can promise the fastest delivery time.’ Still, Miller said that Apple’s venture ‘sounds like a soft launch.'”
Bedigian writes, “‘Given the construction around the [local] Apple Store and how hard it is to get to it, I can see why you’d want to attract customers with the promise of speedy delivery,’ he added. ‘I think you’re gonna see more of this. If you think three years ahead and all the rumors about these dispatched systems like Uber, not just being about cars but being about everything you use in your life, Apple has to at least experiment with this and find out how to stay in this rapid delivery cycle domain.'”
Read more in the full article here.
MacDailyNews Take: Imagine the convenience and customer satisfaction that an Uber-like service for Apple Retail Stores would deliver!
Need to replace you and your wife’s iPhones? Forget driving X number of miles to the nearest Apple Retail Store. You call Apple, back up and wipe your phones, and soon an agent arrives with your new iPhones. Restore from your backups. A minute later another agent arrives to pick up the old iPhones. Done.
I’d like it here in the mountains — the nearest Apple store is 2 hours away… 😆
Reminds me of an episode of Nathan For You where he recommended having a gas station advertise gas prices at $1 after rebate, but the rebate had to be hand delivered to a dropbox located on top of a hiker-only accessible mountaintop.
Depending upon which mountains, I’m retired and could possibly deliver for Apple.
I hope this becomes a great success. I, for one, enjoy going to the Apple store, at least I used to enjoy It. If half of the people at the store will be getting their purchase delivered, then maybe the Apple store will, once again, become a pleasant experience. We need larger stores, Tim. China is important, but don’t forget the pitifuly small mall stores in Apple’s home country…
Somehow, Apple believes in forgetting flyover country. Apple likes homeruns like the Yankees or the Brooklyn Dodgers. Then in 1954, the New York Giants started hitting for singles and went on to win the pennant.
You live in the wrong part of flyover country; Minneapolis/St Paul MN metro has five Apple Stores.
Darn. Wish it was working now. Had to give my airport to client last night. Miss it.
BUT WHAT ABOUT THE CARBON FOOTPRINT????
The what now? How does same-day delivery emit more carbon than next-day delivery?
It improves their carbon footprint – instead of thousands of people travelling to one location they can have tens of people spread out travelling to their nearest hundred locations in the (near) optimal path (near because of travelling salesman problem) – you go from having thousands travelling the distance to the store and back to tens travelling a tour of a hundred close together places and back each day – it’s much much more efficient in terms of saving on miles needed to be travelled – of course if the people aren’t just going there to visit the Apple Store but also to get other things done in town then this makes going to visit the store cheaper carbon wise, but as more and more can be done over the Internet it makes more and more sense to outsource delivery of things to an efficient external delivery system and less and less sense to do bits of your shopping yourself… Anyway who says Apple wouldn’t provide carbon neutral transport to their own private delivery force anyway – the more customers they have the more this makes sense.
That’s not going to happen.
First off, second day can be achieved by UPS, Fedex, US Mail, who are all in the neighborhood already.
Second, no matter how much Apple puts into this, it will only serve limited areas, leaving the others to travel as usual.
Third, Apple and it’s customer would be better served will smaller boutique stores that don’t do service dotted in areas away from main stores.
Sorry, your carbon footprint dream sounds great but isn’t practical.
‘with smaller’
OMG you people thought this was a serious comment. You may want to reevaluate your lives now.
You might want to revisit your writing style.
I like where this could go in the future. Imagine a combination of same-day delivery, geo-location, and self-driving cars. You could order a product from your iPhone from wherever you happen to be, and the product could be delivered to you by robot delivery. If you happen to move to another location while waiting, it will still get to you.
Boom.