Amazon's Fife fulfillment center, courtesy the Scottish government's Flickr page
Amazon knows that when a customer needs a copy of Sting's Brand New Day tour DVD, he or she probably needs it right the hell now. So Amazon has built new distribution centers, sold Prime accounts, and instituted same-day shipping, all in the name of cutting delivery times until brick-and-mortar retailers have no advantages left.
Amazon has long known that its problem isn't convincing people that it's a high-tech marketplace that sells literally everything; various stories about robotic fulfillment centers and smart purchasing suggestions have consumers convinced of that. The problem lies in getting people to think of Amazon as something fast.
Somewhere along the way, Amazon's marketing staff had a stroke of genius: If people believe Amazon to truly be the high-tech commerce giant of the future, with an army of robots making your shopping dreams coming true, why not utilize that mystique to sell the idea of speed?
And so we found ourselves in early December watching a particularly asinine 60 Minutes report about Amazon's plans for delivery drones, which were later revealed by Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos (and not 60 Minutes) to be a flight of fancy that are years away from implementation, as just about any reasonable commentator would have expected.
Now we've got news of a wonderfully ridiculous patent for "anticipatory package shipping" that's already being used to suggest that Amazon can read your mind. Amazon has again grabbed headlines for a system that sounds like the Future of Delivery. And, again, the undercurrent is the same: Amazon is all about speed.
Witness the lede from an RT report: "Retail giant Amazon is revolutionizing the way online purchases are made, with a new patent scheme that would see items shipped out, before the customer buys them."
RT's report isn't alone, as Amazon's patent has been picked up everywhere. The narrative tends to go something like this: Amazon is so obsessed with obliterating shipping times—a natural business goal that nonetheless is treated with the kind of techno-utopian reverence that corporations in other industries must be mind-meltingly envious of—that it's revolutionized shipping yet again. Of course, the patent doesn't actually suggest when such a system might be implemented, nor does anyone else. But hey, it sounds fast.
Indeed, the system Amazon's patent describes is pretty interesting. The patent lays out a method by which items could be pre-packaged and sent to a local distributor from a main hub in anticipation of someone ordering them.
For as many fulfillment centers it has globally, pre-shipping stock to smaller, local distributors could help Amazon speed delivery. Via Amazon
For example, say Amazon's data shows that in Santa Monica, orders of Gucci sunglasses and Porsche sweatpants spike in September. Instead of sending those items individually to a distributor, which might not have the room for huge backstock and full packaging facilities, the company could send a pre-packaged, unlabled Amazon box in anticipation of an order; when an order is received somewhere along the transit route, an address label is slapped on and it's sent on its way.
Considering Amazon's enormous trove of shopping data, trying to predict shopping trends is a tantalizing idea. And it's surely feasible, at least to some degree. People are pretty similar, and if Amazon took a tiny fraction of its most popular orders and pre-shipped just enough of them to fulfill a tiny fraction of potential orders from a region, those pre-shipped boxes probably wouldn't be sitting around for long.
Knowing that it sold 10,000 North Face jackets in New York last November, Amazon could surely pre-ship 100 and label them en route as orders come in without much worry. Or if it finds that 50 people in Toledo hovered their mouse over a certain kitchen knife, Amazon could go ahead and ship one or two knowing that some of those interested parties are likely going to end up buying soon.
Regardless, we're talking about the company receiving a patent. As long as the concept is sound—and certainly it's a fascinating example of what's possible with huge amounts of data—it doesn't matter how much of Amazon's stock ends up actually being pre-shipped for the firm to be able to patent the idea.
Plus, while the system is pretty darn clever in its ability to assign individual destinations for packages in transit, using data to make more intelligent orders of product stock is already a core process for any major retailer.
But that incredible efficiency of modern product delivery systems is beside the point. Amazon knows full and well that any time it can come up with some wild new development, the firm's desire to "cut down delivery time and, possibly, make it even less necessary to visit brick-and-mortar stores," as TIME put it, will be endlessly discussed.
It's a smart strategy, even if it makes you cynical about the state of the tech press. And the company doesn't even have to say anything to win headlines touting its pursuit of speed. "It’s not clear if Amazon has deployed or will deploy the technique," reads the Journal's report. "A spokeswoman declined to comment."