Amazon hails its 2023 delivery success, including (one) drone performance

Amazon’s Prime Air service hasn’t had a surfeit of good news to report about its aerial activities, but the drone delivery unit did get a notable shout-out in this week’s company round-up of the online marketplace’s 2023 work to get orders to clients faster.

On Tuesday, Amazon CEO of worldwide stores Doug Herrington authored a blog post on the company’s increasingly rapid delivery speeds over the past year. In doing so, he said it delivered “more than 7 billion units arriving the same or next day, including more than 4 billion in the US and more than 2 billion in Europe.” Despite founder Jeff Bezos having made the now-notorious 2013 prediction of commonplace speedy drone delivery on the horizon, the 2023 version of that got fairly short shrift in yesterday’s announcement.

Nevertheless, one drone delivery earned the distinction as having been the fastest of all drop-offs in Amazon’s high-speed service to customers: the handoff of a not-so-critical order in one of its two test operation locations in the US.

“At our facility in College Station, Texas, our fastest click-to-delivery time in the fourth quarter of 2023 was 15 minutes and 29 seconds, for a box of Annie’s Cocoa and Vanilla Bunny Cookies,” Herrington wrote, citing it as somewhat debatable evidence of what he’d earlier said was “exciting progress on our Prime Air drone delivery program.”

Given its crushing dominance of retail – and, seemingly, everything else – it’s a bit too easy to dump on Amazon at every opportunity. So, too, is using the divisive character of the unabashedly indecently wealth of Bezos to ridicule his 2013 vision of drones delivering “objects, we think, up to five pounds, which covers 86 percent of the items that we deliver.” At the moment, that seems more like a halicination.

“Amazon Prime Air hoped for 10,000 drone deliveries this year” noted The Verge last May, not resisting that whack-away temptation. “(I)t’s only done 100.”

But it’s trying – and may get there yet. 

Amazon certainly has more money than any other rival to invest in developing drone delivery. Meanwhile, despite the numerous setbacks that activity has suffered – limiting its activity to the modest numbers The Verge evokes – it’s pretty clear the firm and its founder are determined to get it in the air and operating no matter the time or cost required.

Indeed, rather than cop to the minimal role of Air Prime’s drone delivery speed record contribution to Amazon’s otherwise resplendent 2023 transport activity report, Herrington highlighted Amazon’s plans to extend the activity in 2024.

“This year, we’re looking forward to expanding Prime Air to the UK, Italy, and a new U.S. location,” he wrote, after earlier noting why the company’s obsession with fast delivery – by drone, van, car, or bike – is so essential. “The faster we can get products to customers, the more likely they are to buy them.”