First Amazon planned drones and now this -- the online retailer can deliver items to your home in under an hour.
Of course, there are a few catches. First is you must be an Amazon Prime member, which costs $99 a year. Next, unless you are living in "select" areas of Manhattan, you are out of luck and will have to wait for Amazon deliveries the old fashioned way.
If you do happen to fall into those two categories, congratulations! You no longer need to leave your place of residency ever again. All you have to do is download the Prime Now app available on iOS and Android devices. From there you can get deliveries on thousands of different household essential items, like paper towels, books, shampoo and more in under an hour.
How does Amazon manage this exactly? With people riding bicycles. Yes, regular old bikes. Bike messengers ferry items around town from Amazon's new 34th Street building in New York City. The service runs seven days a week from 6 a.m. to midnight. If you want your delivery in an hour or less, you will have to pay $7.99 extra. If you are willing to wait an extra hour, that fee will be waived.
"There are times when you can't make it to the store and other times when you simply don't want to go," Dave Clark, senior vice president of Amazon worldwide operations, says of the new service. "There are so many reasons to skip the trip and now Prime members in Manhattan can get the items they need delivered in an hour or less."
The good news is that Amazon plans to add more U.S. cities to the service over the course of next year.
Get excited, people! Soon Amazon will rule the world with their drone armies and bike crews, but what do we care? As long as we get our packages on time.
