A lot of attention has rightly been paid to the toll that fulfilling our orders takes upon workers in warehouses or drivers in delivery vans. But additionally, as our purchases hurtle towards us in ever-higher volumes and at ever-faster rates, they exert an unseen, transformative pressure – on infrastructure, on cities, on the companies themselves. “The customer is putting an enormous strain on the supply chain,” said James Nicholls, a managing partner at Stephen George + Partners, an industrial architecture firm. “Especially if you are ordering a thing in five different colours, trying them all on, and sending four of them back.”
How the pressures of home delivery reorder the world can be understood best through the “last mile” – which is not strictly a mile but the final leg that a parcel travels from, say, Magna Park 3 to a bedsit in Birmingham. The last mile obsesses the delivery industry. No one in the day-to-day hustle of e-commerce talks very seriously about the kind of trial-balloon gimmicks that claim to revolutionise the last mile: deliveries by drones and parachutes and autonomous vehicles, zeppelin warehouses, robots on sidewalks. Instead, the most pressing last-mile problems feel basic, low-concept, old-school. How best to pack a box. How to beat traffic. What to do when a delivery driver rings the doorbell and no one is home. What to do with the forests of used cardboard. In home delivery, the last mile has become the most expensive and difficult mile of all. (...)
E-commerce has turned even the laying of a floor into a fiendishly involved business. The concrete floors of B2B sheds were already being built to an exacting degree of flatness, calibrated using lasers, so that forklifts would not teeter while lifting pallets to the highest shelves. As the urgency of home delivery grew, robotic pickers began to populate e-commerce sheds, so the floors had to be flatter still – first poured to a standard called FM2, and the robots’ aisles then ground down further to FM1. In these “superflat floors”, even a 10th of a millimetre matters. The merest waywardness in a robotic picker can tangle up the whole shed’s operations and delay thousands of deliveries.
But as delivery schedules have dwindled into hours, even the gigantic warehouse full of stuff in a central place such as the triangle is proving insufficient. Now, companies also need smaller distribution centres around the country, to respond rapidly to orders and to abbreviate the last mile as much as possible. These smaller sheds cannot stock as much, but the foresight of data analytics now makes a keen strategic efficiency possible. Woodbridge remembers how, while visiting a shipping provider’s facility a few years ago, he saw a curious pile of Amazon parcels.
“I said: ‘They haven’t got any names on them. Who are they for?’” he told me. The packages held video games, it turned out: the newest edition of the annual Fifa series by Electronic Arts. “And they said: ‘Amazon knows, if you’ve bought the game for the last three years or whatever, that you’re likely to buy it again.’ So they’ve already got it packaged up for you, waiting for you to press the button. You do that, and they’ll stick your name on it, and it’s gone.”
How our home delivery habit reshaped the world (The Guardian)
Image: AP S/Alamy
