Their drones could easily be $30k+ a pop, and if they crash, need maintenance, irretrievably fly out of range, or simply become targets of angry people wanting to break them... all problems frequently encountered with high grade hobbyist drones.... then their value vs. an employee is questionable.
Crucially we're not even talking about R&D efforts, insurance, regulatory clearing costs, and probably the biggest cost, legal mishaps - and I mean very serious lawsuits - even toy-like DJI Phantom drones can fall/ crash and kill people.
I could see drone delivery to rural areas... but urban areas I don't think it's feasible at all, at least not for a long while.
And anyway, driverless cars are happening. Why do you need a drone when the robo uber taxi had a robot arm in the boot and delivers packages during slow times of day?
Drones could be useful for a lot of things but if the problem is delivering heavy packages cheaply to places with road access, they are not a rational choice.
Just for comparison, I had phones (flip-phones, mind you) from Samsung, LG, and Motorola with NFC in 2006. We could use them at MCD's, 7-eleven, and a few other places. Fast-forward 9 years and there has been little uptake, except that there are phones actually available to people with NFC, and acceptance is more commonplace.
In general, people take much longer to adopt new technology than we would like to see.
If the basic drone delivery model were viable, it seems to me as if today it would be viable to have a Kozmo 2.0 sort of service in urban areas. It might have higher labor costs (not at all clear as you could use pretty low wage workers) but it would have a whole lot less capital requirements and we know how to do it today. I guess Amazon is doing this in a very limited way with Amazon Fresh.
Crucially we're not even talking about R&D efforts, insurance, regulatory clearing costs, and probably the biggest cost, legal mishaps - and I mean very serious lawsuits - even toy-like DJI Phantom drones can fall/ crash and kill people.
I could see drone delivery to rural areas... but urban areas I don't think it's feasible at all, at least not for a long while.