If you want to see, can click the gear in the upper right on the site. Then format. Then check the log box. No URL scheme, unfortunately, or I'd link it for ya.
If you assume a driver’s wage is at least the Seattle minimum wage of $15 per hour, add nominal fulfillment and delivery costs of $5 per order (the contractor’s fuel, car etc.) and nominal sales and marketing and general administration costs of $5 per order, Amazon needs to fulfill close to eight minimum order ($35) deliveries per hour to breakeven just on the variable costs
Across 25 associates, the average number of orders was only 3.
There's a third option for how this service survives: increase adoption so that:
- variable SG&A drops from $5 per order
- stops are closer so delivery costs drop from $5 per order
It seems like the person who wrote this analysis assumed unchanging variable costs, rather than recognizing that they will decrease over time.
1) Where did they get a $5 marginal SG&A number? This seems high to me and no source is given.
2) There is no way that, at scale, delivery costs are as high as $5/order.
The IRS standard rate for mileage in 2018 is 54.5 cents/mile. (Maybe not the most accurate metric to use, but a decent rule of thumb.) So this analysis assumes that, at scale, for the average order a driver travels 9.17 miles. This routing would be incredibly inefficient - Amazon should "batch" deliveries so that in a 10-mile "loop" a driver can drop off 3+ orders.
Furthermore, I'm not sure if Amazon drivers are employees or 1099 workers. If they're independent contractors, the delivery costs are irrelevant to Amazon, since they're passed through to the drivers.
3) Naturally, drivers utilization rates will increase as demand increases.
Yes, you are right. But increasing adoption across different zipcodes won't help that much (although, yes, it’ll bring SG&A per order down). The adoption has to increase in the exact same area (your point #2 has to be true, i.e. stops should be so close, like an apartment building) for drivers to make more orders per hour, and for this service to be profitable in the long run.
Opendoor | Software engineers, data scientists | San Francisco, CA | ONSITE, FULL-TIME
At Opendoor, we’re on a mission to make it simple to buy and sell homes. The traditional process is broken, with an average home taking over 90 days to sell and costing thousands of dollars. We make buying and selling a home stress-free and instant. We’ve built an exceptional team, have raised over $300 million from top-notch investors and are growing fast, buying and selling more than $100 million of homes per month.
We use golang, python, ruby, and elixir. If you're interested, send us your resume! We're hiring across a bunch of different teams. https://www.opendoor.com/jobs
Opendoor | Software engineers, data scientists | San Francisco, CA | ONSITE, FULL-TIME
At Opendoor, we’re on a mission to make it simple to buy and sell homes. The traditional process is broken, with an average home taking over 90 days to sell and costing thousands of dollars. We make buying and selling a home stress-free and instant. We’ve built an exceptional team, have raised over $300 million from top-notch investors and are growing fast, buying and selling more than $100 million of homes per month.
We use golang, python, ruby, and elixir. If you're interested, send us your resume! We're hiring across a bunch of different teams. https://www.opendoor.com/jobs
Tim Cook says he's never read a bill of materials that was anywhere close to accurate. I believe it- the last time I got an iPhone replaced, I asked what they were doing with the old unit and the person said they were probably going to reuse the touch id sensor since that was one of the most valuable parts.
The Touch ID sensor value in the second hand market is not reflective of the cost to Apple... it’s expensive because there are no third party replacements, so the supply is restricted to parts taken from broken phones.
- Lawrence Weschler - Seeing is Forgetting the Name of the Thing One Sees. A quality biography of Robert Irwin based on interviews over decades, and helps you learn to appreciate minimalist art to boot.
- Jane Austen - Pride and Prejudice
- Kurt Vonnegut - Breakfast of Champions
- Burton G. Malkiel - A Random Walk Down Wall Street
- Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie - Americanah. Saw myself in several of these characters
- Nikos Kazantzakis - Zorba the Greek
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Also good:
- Jack London - John Barleycorn: Alcoholic Memoirs. Illustrates all of the interesting ways in which a person is tempted to drink: when someone else buys you one, when it's cold outside, ...
- Danny Bowien - The Mission Chinese Food Cookbook. Lots of stories between the recipes.
- David Byrne - How Music Works
- Meg Jay - The Defining Decade
- Ernest Hemingway - A Moveable Feast
- Magdalena Droste - Bauhaus 1919-1933
- Arimasa Osawa - Shinjuku Shark
- Zadie Smith - Changing My Mind
- Chinua Achebe - Things Fall Apart
- Oscar Wilde - The Picture of Dorian Gray
- Marie Kondo - The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up
- Haruki Murakami - The Strange Library. A fifteen minute read.
- Tim Ferriss - The Four-Hour Workweek. Good tactics for saving time; bad business advice.
