B.C. by Mastroianni and Hart for December 20, 2023

The first drone

Those air-dropped refrigerators can be a nuisance at times.

Where I live Amazon hires USPS to deliver

The high street of my nearest town is fairly bereft of shops. So I feel sorry for Peter……

Better not let Jeff Bezos see this toon or he’ll want one.

Imagine if the company hired real Amazons [Diana Prince type] to make their deliveries???

I have heard that in some states drones are delivering " pizza " ’ s ?

The lament of small businesses everywhere…

Just being the competition has replaced ‘beating’ the competition. It’s a survival mode.

An early version of Amazon?

Click and Order vs. Brick and Mortar.

We’ve been through this transition before. Supermarkets vs. the General Store. Single screen movie houses vs. the Googleplex. Regional Airlines (Southern, Ozark, Mohawk, Piedmont, etc.) vs. American Airlines, etc.

Local retail is on the losing end of the struggle. They cannot hold enough diverse items in inventory, nor can they compete with the economy of scale when buying millions of an item instead of dozens. It used to be that if you ordered something from a catalog, you’d have to wait at least a week for delivery. Now next day delivery is the norm.

It can even be argued that Click and Order is better for the environment than Brick and Mortar. It takes less energy per square foot to operate a warehouse than a retail store. Also there is the difference between 100 cars making 100 individual trips than a single (often electric) truck making 100 deliveries.

Mom and pop stores will still exist, but it will be in niches other than retail.

Next – Cave porch lizards.

Nice airdrop. Landed more or less inside the cave.

must admit it would be cool to have pterodactyls as delivery animals

Is that where Amazon got its name????

And Santa’s sleigh is pulled by eight of them.

As much as I like to patronize local businesses, even the big box stores, It’s hard not to shop Amazon when what you want isn’t available locally and you can order at 5 in the afternoon, and it shows up on your door step the next morning. The downside? Amazon is building the worlds largest fulfillment center in Ontario, California which was once the center of the California dairy industry. At 4.2 Million square feet of space and 200 tractor trailer loading docks, it dwarfs the 2-1 million square foot warehouse directly across the street. Ontario is home to 600 warehouses, the smallest being 210,000 square feet of space. All the dairy farms are gone. Thousands of acres of green have been replaced with thousands of acres of concrete, and as much as the residents didn’t want this kind of growth, every building permit for each warehouse received 7-0 city council votes in favor of construction. 14 dairy farmers sold their farms (8,000 acres) within 2 months of each other for 10 times the value of the land. Of the 32,000 acres of land in Ontario, California, only 9,000 is green. On top of all that, Amazon just added 10 Airbus A-330 cargo planes to their Amazon Air fleet. In two years they expect to have as many aircraft as either FedEx and UPS. The price of progress.

Neither can probably 95% of the small businesses that end up with their products/inventions cannabalized by the company…..then they’re quickly & quietly dumped as a vendor…..ain’t free enterprise wonderful?

Amazon’s supposed drone delivery never really materialized. It’s what inspired me to write Death From Above though.

Temu can if you don’t mind a wait.

We still try to buy local, but sometimes it’s just not economically responsible.

You’ll rest easy and feel great after filling out their Survey and Tipping their Delivery Thing.

Now, if this were Over The Hedge, it would be an air-dropped cow landing on Verne, the turtle.

While I do shop online for a few things I can’t find locally I can say I haven’t used Amazon or Ebay for years and I’ve survived nicely. I search for what I want using duckduckgo and dig down until I find a smaller business that has what I want although that is getting harder as most search results now come up as Walmart or Amazon

I wonder if that pterosaur was a protodrone?

Small local stores will likely have a great weekend of last minute sales.

That’s about the condition most Amazon packages arrive in.

Start selling on Amazon. When you can’t beat ’em…