Because the current van and truck experience for me is a tracking update at 6am saying "Your package is out for delivery" and then it actually gets delivered sometime in the next 12 hours. As a customer that's a crappy experience. Hopefully flex will push everyone to up their game with regards to delivery experience. If vans and trucks are more efficient then they should win out in the long run because they can operate at lower margins.
Disclaimer: I work with Amazon, not on the Flex team. My words don't represent the company.
The 12 hours here refers to the delivery window on the delivery day, not the time to ship the package. Though the total delivery time is certainly much less than 4-6 weeks.
I don't understand your comment. Do you mean that we should back to the 4-6 weeks delivery or if you're just annotating the notion that things have improved in the the last few decades?
It's that a 12 hour window being "crappy" is like saying your transatlantic flight being delayed 30 minutes is "crappy" (my first Atlantic crossing took 10 days I think). It's all about perspective :-)
Once we have a taste of what's possible it's really hard to accept that the status quo is good enough. With Prime Now I can get a lot of things ordered, shipped, and delivered within 2 hours, with live updates when the delivery person is on their way and arrives outside my house. I remember the days of multi-week ground shipping, I'm really glad we kept pushing the limits.
Disclaimer: I work with Amazon, not on the Flex team. My words don't represent the company.