Well said. This market has always been "closed-in" due to distance which had suited corporations rather nicely, at the same time preventing any change or progress.

I think the drones were just a marketing gimmick like Lexus' maglev hoverboard. I don't see them entering the mainstream - if anything they will be an additional (and possibly expensive), quick delivery option for distant, rural areas.

Drones are a way of bridging the last mile for physical goods and breaking the stranglehold of the likes of auspost and DHL. Two or three bases can cover a city of 4-5 million and deliver online orders faster than you could get to a physical shop.

I'd expect it would start for small, light weight devices (like phones), but expand out from there over time. And drones can easily deliver in the evening, which post fails massively at.

Digging around for some numbers, I've found How Can Amazon Charge $1 for Drone Delivery?

I don't see it coming to rural areas till way down the line.

I always thought that they'd use drones to deliver small orders to individuals. I never thought of it as the mainstream of times to come.

Also, I don't think a drone will be able to load up LOTS of stuff and just drop packages off house after house, and shuttling back and forth to load and unload each time doesn't seem too economical either.

I still think it would be better suited to rural areas where priority delivery might not be economical today (like DHL heading to some place in the middle of nowhere with just one package).

Did you read the numbers page?

If you assume 30 deliveries per drone per day (I can see that number being higher) and the cost of the hardware amortized over a year (say $5000 all up), then you can deliver a light package for ~46c. If you were doing rural and could only manage, say, 2 deliveries per day, then we are at $6.84 per delivery.

Suburban plots are the main focus I feel.

Auspost pay their delivery van contractors $1.10 per parcel (not including the van or petrol) - so even if I were out on those rough numbers, it STILL makes sense in terms of the timeliness and absolute numbers.

Partly agree. When it comes to tech, we are up there with everyone apart from the US and Japan - certainly we get the same as Europe and prices are generally very good and sometimes the cheapest in the world. Different story with fashion, so if you are into that then overseas is definitely better. When of the nerdy things I like is high quality engineering stationery - technical pens and pencils, drawing equipment etc. Australia is hopeless for this (and so is the UK to be honest) and prices are mental, so Germany and Japan are my sources

So Australia falls down on very specialised stuff but to be fair most countries outside of the US, parts of Europe, Japan do too

Hearing that about stationery - just recently we needed some 6" x 4" post-it notes for a project we are running at work. Unbelievable, nobody sells that size sticky note in Australia. I found plenty of suppliers in the US that did, but wouldn't ship here, so ended up ordering from Amazon UK.


S

Yes Australia is crap for decent stationery but better than the UK - Staples is a shittier, lower-rent version of Officeworks

Rakuten is a great Japanese source for this kind of thing with massive choice, low prices and often has free shipping. Amazon.de too

If you are ever in Tokyo check out the Itoya store in Ginza - nothing else like it on the planet