This is one in an occasional series, “Delivery Economy.”
It’s Christmas Eve, and the little ones — who are supposed to be asleep — have their noses pressed to their frosty bedroom windows, searching the cloudy sky for the presents being delivered by ... drones.
“Physically, they are perfectly feasible,” said Willem-Jan Van Hoeve, an associate professor in the Carnegie Mellon University Tepper School of Business. “But a big hurdle for drones is the legal status. Do we allow drones to go from Point A to Point B without a physical person having them in sight? The technology is almost there or even already there. It’s just a matter of legalization.”
A great many people are nervous about the idea of unmanned aerial vehicles flying low over them.
“Amazon and others are developing these delivery drones. They’ve made great leaps in this technology,” Mr. Van Hoeve said. “But I would not want them to deploy them on a massive scale. From a delivery standpoint, they can be a great tool, but you have to be very careful. You have to think about accidents that may happen.
“I think it’s a good thing that it’s taking time for this to be adopted because it would be very bad to blindly adopt technology without looking very carefully at the consequences.”
“There’s a lot of buzz about drones,” said Jeff Inman, a professor of marketing and business administration at the University of Pittsburgh. “Amazon is taking us a step in that direction this year. They’re leading the way with a special deal for Prime subscribers that guarantees delivery up until Christmas Eve.”
But those aren’t drone deliveries. They’re done the old-fashioned way — by truck — and Amazon’s website does not list Pittsburgh among the 16 metro areas where it is available.
So where do you turn? Well, you know Dasher and Dancer and Prancer and Vixen. But do you recall Uber, the most famous app-driven vehicle service of all?
“Uber is stepping into that space, delivering right up to Christmas,” Mr. Inman said. “You could put in an order asking them to pick up the XBox you ordered in Monroeville and deliver it to an address in the North Hills. You can do that right now, but it’s a little clunky. It can’t be too long before Uber makes that service much more streamlined. They’ve got the drivers.”
Technology also is improving the tracking and delivery of goods in the more traditional ways.
BFAds.net, for example, is a website that not only enables users to find store hours and track the best bargains, but it also provides updates on shipping dates and costs.
“A couple years ago, there were ice storms that hit the Midwest and messed up the shipping and people weren’t getting their items in time for Christmas,” said David Varble, manager of the company based in Beloit, Wis. “So last year, Target and Amazon beefed up their delivery services, and then there weren’t any storms and they took some losses there. It will be interesting to see how it plays out this year.”
BFAds.net — the BF stands for Black Friday — was started in 2003 by Michael Brim, a teenager at the time who was tracking what stores had what items on sale after Thanksgiving. He realized there might be some value to the information, Mr. Varble said, and created the website.
The company, which has more than a million subscribers, gets access to advertisements weeks before they show up in the Thanksgiving newspapers and in commercials during the televised parades. You can browse on your phone and share with family and friends.
“We do a lot of the legwork for the consumer, so they don’t have to dig through everything,” Mr. Varble said. “We produce a buying guide, we have a wish list feature that’s really popular. We also can send out notifications right to your phone if a sale goes early. It really helps you stay in the know.
“A lot of merchants are purposely vague about their Black Friday information, because they want you to come to the store. They know that once they get you in the doors, you’re likely to buy different items that are not necessarily big deals. That way they can make some of their money back from the sale items.”
“Traditional marketing is very different from online marketing,” Mr. Van Hoeve said. “For example. a store like Macy’s, a big, permanent retail outlet, has very good knowledge of how to move people through the store. If you design the store a certain way, you basically guide the consumer toward interesting products and very directly influence them by displays. This has been studied for a long time.
“On the Internet, it doesn’t work like that. You can still try to guide people. but it’s a different marketing technology, a different game you play there. You can look at what do they click on and you can give other options. ’If you click on this, you might like this also.’ ”
A retail store offers sales help for your shopping, but the clerks might be busy, uninformed or biased toward making a sale. Online shoppers sitting in their homes have a greater variety of choice and can research prices and customer satisfaction. But at the store, you can feel it and try it on.
Also, people are more accustomed to shopping online. It used to be that if a store was out of stock, they’d order the product for you. Today, shoppers can save time by ordering the product themselves.
“I think a lot of shoppers are pretty savvy. They plan,” Mr. Inman said. “My family has a tradition. We stand in line and talk to other shoppers. They’ve got their lists and it’s all pretty well mapped out. There’s more cherry-picking than most stores would like to think.
“There’s still a segment of the population that sticks with the big, fat newspaper that comes out on Thanksgiving Day full of the ads. Folks sit down and figure out what they’re going to buy. Less than 10 percent of purchases this season are going to be made online. We still have 90 percent of the sales made in the brick-and-mortar stores.
“It’s not our parents’ Christmas, that’s for sure. I think we’ve landed splat in the 21st century. It’s still the time of year to go and get gifts, and I think we just need to have the right spirit. But it’s not like it used to be.”
Dan Majors: dmajors@post-gazette.com and 412-263-1456.
First Published: November 22, 2015, 5:00 a.m.
