There was a little news splash last week from the rollout of Amazon.com's one-hour delivery service in the Twin Cities.
What made this particularly noteworthy, however, largely escaped me. It's really nothing more than another reminder that the options for quick in-home delivery are exploding here in the Twin Cities.
It's difficult to know where to start a list. In addition to the Amazon.com news, you may recently have read that the delivery service Instacart has linked up with Target Corp. to deliver groceries.
Consumers in the Twin Cities also can outsource their beer run using a mobile phone application called DrinkFly. Four liquor stores will now deliver into my neighborhood using it.
Then there's the Uberization of home delivery, with a service called Postmates that has rolled into the Twin Cities. Much like Uber, with its application to arrange automobile rides, this service has a mobile app that will let consumers arrange to have something picked up and delivered to the house. That means it's also looking for drivers along with customers
The appeal of some of these services is a little bit difficult to grasp, although maybe that's just a sign that it'll be difficult to break a 30-year habit of picking up groceries in a store and lugging them to the car.
What is clear, however, is that managers ofconsumer-oriented companies large and small must have a strategy for extending the supply chain all the way to the front door of the customer's residence. There's nothing about this management problem that appears easy to figure out.
