Soon 30-Minute Delivery Option Won’t Just Be for Pizza Anymore, Says Amazon

Last night on “60 Minutes,” Amazon founder and CEO Jeff Bezos unveiled to Charlie Rose the company’s latest advancement in customer convenience — Amazon Prime Air, which will promise package delivery by tiny, unmanned drones that Bezos called "octocopters" within 30 minutes of order placement.

By Jennifer Elks | Published 11 years ago | About a 2 minute read

Bezos said the drones could carry packages weighing up to five pounds, which makes up 86 percent of the company’s deliveries.

“It could be a ten-mile radius from a fulfillment center,” the CEO said. “So, in urban areas, you could actually cover very significant portions of the population.”

Bezos balked when Rose suggested Amazon, which introduced the first e-reader, the Kindle, and last year instituted same-day delivery and just last month announced Sunday delivery, may be using its power to put smaller brick and mortar retailers, particularly booksellers, out of business.

“You’ve got to earn your keep in this world,” Bezos said. “When you invest something new, if customers come to the party, it’s disruptive to the old way.

“The Internet is disrupting every media industry — people can complain about that, but complaining is not a strategy. Amazon is not happening to bookselling — the future is happening to bookselling.”

While the pros for such a service are obvious (convenience, zero delivery-vehicle emissions), for now, many questions — about potential package interceptions/ensuring proper delivery, customer privacy, mitigating human interference with drones, potential job losses to the postal workforce — still abound about Prime Air, but Amazon has certainly given customers and other online retailers a lofty idea to chew on in the meantime.

Amazon claims to serve 225 million customers around the world and estimates that its fulfillment centers would receive orders for more than 300 items per second today, Cyber Monday.