November the 19th 2015 here at Milkman’s will be remembered as Same-Day’s Day. It’s the date in which we received the most google-alerted news about Same-Day deliveries ever.
First there was Royal Mail, in Britain, acquiring eCourier, a Same-Day startup (actually the real piece of info started circulating the day before). Then we read that Apple was going for Same-Day deliveries in Manhattan just in time for Christmas. All the good children now can have their iPad under the Yule Tree. I can almost see Santa with the bitten apple logo on his sack. Uh, sorry, I forgot: the magic sack has already been branded by Amazon, at least on some blogs.
Jeff Bezos, being very irritated that both Argos and Royal Mail were going for Same-Day in all of Great Britain, just after Amazon had announced Same-Day Prime in London, decided he had to shatter the competition. He went Same-Day all over the place: Birmingham, Bristol, Dudley, Milton Keynes, Northampton, Walsall, Wolverhampton, Edinburgh, Glasgow and then all of the Central Belt!!
It wasn’t over: Total Wine & More declared that Same-Day provider Instacart was to be his partner in California. Enough? No? Then hear this: Google Express is runnig overnight in Orange County.
Some survey guys asked people if they actually want to pay dear money to receive stuff right here, right now. It turns out that 93.1% of Americans value price over speed. Only 15% factor speed of delivery when choosing a retailer, and just 3% look for Same-Day. More than 50% are not willing to pay extra to receive items on the same day, apart for groceries. And this is just QuestionPro. According to Bizrate, 22% of digital buyers in North America believed same-day delivery was important in 2013. Fast-forward to 2015, and only 18% agreed. There’s a lot of other surveys out there that say the exact same things.
We repeat what was written the last milkman’s newsletter: while nobody really seems to care much about same-day, the mission is becoming more and more apparent. It is to spoil all of us lazy consumers to such an extent that we cannot survive without the Big Players any more.
