If you live in the nation’s capital, your next takeout order could be delivered by a small, six-wheeled robot vaguely reminiscent of WALL-E.
Part of a pilot food delivery program launched by Starship Technologies and Postmates, the self-driving robots can pick up orders and travel to a customer’s house up to two miles away, using cameras and GPS tracking to dodge pedestrians and other obstacles. Customers can follow the bot’s journey through an app, or kick back and wait for a text notification that their meal has arrived outside, and then open the door and click a link to unlock the bot to retrieve their food.
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With its robo-deliveries, Starship aims to reduce delivery times and fuel costs. It’s just one of a broad array of tools companies are using to speed up service and get customers what they want as quickly as possible. As Starship robots take to the streets:
- 7-Eleven just completed a one month aerial drone delivery test in Nevada.
- Amazon Prime Air made its first drone delivery in the U.K.
- TacoBell last year unveiled the Tacobot — an artificial intelligence chatbot that integrates with the Slack messaging platform to allow customers to text orders from their desks.
- Dominos rolled out a “zero click” app that automatically orders your favorite hot pie seconds after the app is opened.
These time-saving systems, and the race to create even faster ones, are part of an emerging instant gratification economy designed to accommodate what consumer psychologist Kit Yarrow calls the “I want what I want when I want it” customer, or IWWIWWIWI. Having our desires delivered in minutes is a convenient game changer for those who have trouble making shopping trips, but the instant gratification economy faces serious challenges — and possible unintended psychological effects.
The Need for Speed
For Starship executive Henry Harris-Burland, the newer, speedier economy is about more than just getting goods faster. It’s also about rethinking traditional business models. Starship’s pilot programs will initially focus on food — the company is also testing automated delivery in partnership with DoorDash in Redwood, California — but the plan is to eventually provide retail, grocery, and parcel delivery, sans human drivers.
“The last couple of miles from a hub or a store to a customer’s house is incredibly inefficient,” Harris-Burland says. “Think about vans stopping and starting 150 times outside of 150 houses in one neighborhood. It’s an incredibly large waste of time. We’re looking to totally revolutionize those traditional delivery methods.”
Cruising at a max speed of four miles-per-hour, Starship bots generally deliver within 15 to 30 minutes, Harris-Burland says.
Should Starship break into the retail market, it will be competing in a space that already relies heavily on technology to reduce shipping times. To deliver goods in one day, or one hour in select locations, Amazon uses proprietary algorithms to determine exactly where items should be stored within warehouses, the shortest path human “pickers” can take to retrieve the items, and the exact amount of time it should take to fulfill each order.
The company is constantly pushing the boundaries of speedy delivery. It has filed patents for an “airborne fulfillment center” — a flying warehouse where aerial drones can refill between deliveries — and an “anticipatory package shipping” system designed to predict what you need, package it, and send it in your general direction (but not to your house) before you place an order.
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This year, UPS will implement ORION (On-Road Integrated Optimization and Navigation), a 1,000-page algorithm that determines the shortest driver routes by evaluating up to 200,000 alternatives for each trip. ORION shortens routes by an average of seven to eight miles, the company says. When fully deployed, it will save $300 to $400 million per year in fuel and human resource costs.
Smaller businesses lack the time and resources to build their own mega-algorithms, which is where companies like Routific come in. Aimed at helping the little guys keep up, Routific offers optimization software that takes a list of drivers and destinations and finds the best routes.
The system doesn’t find the perfect route — it could take years for a computer to churn through every possibility. But it does find a near-optimal solution in minutes, helping clients cut drive times and fuel consumption by about 40 percent. It also provides substantially shortened delivery times, says Routific CEO Marc Kuo.
As delivery times quicken, a cottage industry of startups is attacking other time-wasting aspects of retail. Shane Mac, CEO of Assist, is aiming to end telephone hold times with his automated messaging system. Assist provides customer service for about 20 brands using messaging platforms like Facebook and Slack, as well as automated voice platforms like Siri and Google Home. Instead of phoning a call center only to be put on hold, users can book a hotel, buy movie tickets, make a charitable donation, etc., all through text and voice commands. Assist also keeps identification and payment information on file to speed things up.
“We went from people waiting on hold 25 minutes to people being able to change a reservation they made to our hotel in under 30 seconds,” Mac says. “We’re giving everyone in the world a lot of time back.”
Speed and the Psyche
Delivery in one day, or even one hour, is still far from providing instant gratification. But as we move closer to that point, it’s worth considering how it impacts consumers.
Research shows that the speed at which we can satisfy our desires affects both what we want and how much we’re willing to pay for it. That suggests ultrafast delivery could affect more than just when we get our purchases — it could affect our minds and our behavior.
One possible reason is because “people value a reward in the present twice as much as they would value the same reward in the future,” says David Laibson, chair of Harvard University’s economics department and director of its Foundations of Human Behavior Initiative.
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When faced with immediate rewards, we often decide based on what we want now regardless of what consequences it may bring later. When offered choices with rewards available in several days or months, we’re more likely make decisions based on long-term needs and goals.
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