Amazon has quietly opened a new front in the battle for ultra-fast delivery, becoming the first retailer in Britain to drop parcels by drone after a limited launch in Darlington, County Durham.
The service, operated under the company’s long-gestating Prime Air programme, will see packages weighing less than 5lb (2.2kg) flown out from an Amazon fulfilment centre to homes within a 7.5-mile (12km) radius. Initial payloads are unglamorous but practical: beauty products, batteries, charging cables and the kind of small household items shoppers tend to discover they need only when it is already too late to drive to the shops.
For Amazon, which first promised drone deliveries more than a decade ago and has since watched the technology stutter through regulatory and engineering setbacks, the Darlington launch is both a proof point and a test bed. For Britain’s retail sector, including the small and medium-sized businesses that increasingly rely on Amazon’s logistics network, it is a sharper reminder still that the goalposts on customer expectation are moving once again.
The trial’s earliest beneficiary was Rob Shield, a Darlington farmer who let Amazon use an Airbnb on his land for its first test runs. The novelty, he admits, soon took over.
“Initially it was a novelty, so we were ordering everything under the sun,” he says. “Pens, paper, chocolates, anything to make it keep coming.”
Support authors and subscribe to content
This is premium stuff. Subscribe to read the entire article.
