Amazon has moved far beyond its original incarnation as an online bookseller and is now a prominent seller of digital content, but the deal with USPS suggests the continuing importance that people place on getting things and having them in their hands.
Unfortunately, we outside of Amazon cannot know just what it is that USPS will be delivering to Amazon customers on Sundays. As Farhad Manjoo has described:
We don’t know where Amazon expects to make money from in the future. Indeed, we barely know where Amazon makes money from now. The company refuses to divulge even the most basic stats about its business. Amazon’s earnings calls are a comedy of opacity and misdirection; you’d have a better chance getting a guard at Buckingham Palace guard to crack a smile than to get an Amazon exec to accidentally tell you about the company’s business.So we don't know how many of these Sunday deliveries will include the DVDs that Blockbuster couldn't get people to rent anymore, or CDs or books or other physical media that have become technological underdogs. Is Sunday delivery a meaningful sign of their continuing relevance? Or is this really about people ordering toasters, or pet food, or any of the other thousands and thousands of products available via Amazon?
The announcement's proximity to Christmas shopping time suggests the latter. But as Amazon continues to build and improve its infrastructure for fast and cheap delivery of physical goods, it can help to keep physical media a practical alternative to their instantly acquirable digital counterparts.
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