urbanMSP

I tried finding a good thread for this mental ramble, and ended up thinking there might as well be a single thread for the topic of trend spotting and predicting.

A few days ago I spotted a new piece about Camden Property Trust, an apartment management company that manages something like 59,000 units of apartments around the country (none in Minnesota?). Camden just stopped accepting deliveries to their renters at the apartment offices.

http://www.wsj.com/articles/package-gat ... 1445333401

The growth in e-commerce has made deliveries so common that staff hours and space is now significantly taken up with accepting, documenting, storing, and verifying pickup of deliveries.

I wonder if the explosion in Internet shopping means we will see this become a norm in more and more apartments and condos?

Or will this be more of a concern in suburban areas where walking to stores isn't available? Or might we see something where luxury buildings staff a full time "mailroom" employee to manage internet orders being delivered?

Could this be a business opportunity in the right neighborhood where apartments decline package deliveries we see FedEx or UPS stores showing up where people go to pick up deliveries in their neighborhood and end up as common as coffee shops. Heck, maybe have a hybrid concept "coffee shop/delivery drop off".

It made me think of the post office outlets around Europe that show up in places Americans would least expect.

I haven't lived in an apartment for about 19 years and Internet shopping wasn't the retail havoc it has become. Is declining deliveries a trend in the Twin Cities?

Just a year and a half ago, living in Stevens Square, my property manager would accept packages, but it was always pretty stressful, because half the time, it seemed like the delivery drivers didn't know where to bring the packages, and I just remember having to jump through hoops enough times that I just started shipping packages to my parents house and picking them up whenever I'd visit.

University campuses with on campus residences for students are also being buried by Internet commerce deliveries. Student mail rooms are being buried by package delivery.

http://consumerist.com/2015/10/06/amazo ... -campuses/

It will be interesting to see how campus dorms and apartment/condo developments evolve to deal with this trend.

Could this be a business opportunity in the right neighborhood where apartments decline package deliveries we see FedEx or UPS stores showing up where people go to pick up deliveries in their neighborhood and end up as common as coffee shops. Heck, maybe have a hybrid concept "coffee shop/delivery drop off".

It made me think of the post office outlets around Europe that show up in places Americans would least expect.

It looks to happening now. Our local UPS and Fedex(maybe only UPS) drop off and pick up point is Bone Adventure on Hennepin. In the past, I recall there being drop off points for pre paid packages, but not designated local pick up locations for UPS and Fedex. Our building isn't staffed, so when the driver could not get in, they left the package at the local shop, which is a lot better than driving to Roseville or wherever the local UPS base is. An ID is required to grab the package.

Our last building in the North Loop did leave your packages within your unit. Nice perk, but I suspect time consuming around the holidays.

I feel like they need to rethink the way they build mail rooms in new buildings to accommodate package lockers and a way for ups/FedEx to access them the way the USPS does.

This company is addressing the package delivery issue,

http://www.doorman.co/

It's been 10.5 years since I lived in an apartment, but even then, I remember the office having to spend a lot of time dealing with packages. During the holidays there would be stacks and stacks of boxes in the party room; they would just put everything in there and tell us to find our stuff.

I know some people deal with this by having things shipped to their workplace, but I've also read that many companies are cracking down on that as well.

Things like the Amazon Lockers are a good way of dealing with this issue, and I think we will see more of them and similar delivery/storage methods in the future.

if your stuff is shipped with UPS you can have them send it to a ups store (or other participating businesses, I think) and pick it up whenever is convenient. that service is actually free I believe

Solutions like that Doorman seem to be kind of missing the point, they're just sidestepping the issue of "it's a pain to deal with packages" and paying someone else to do that for you. Having stuff dropped in some central automated place like an Amazon locker or your local store in theory makes the whole process cheaper, instead of a brown truck full of packages driving around the neighborhood, that brown truck can just stop at one local store/locker and drop everything there. I guess you pay yourself in the minor inconvenience of the extra time spent going to get your package, but things should be setup that wherever you get your package is "on your way" from whatever you usually do. In my case a package locker at my local LRT station would be convenient, because I'm already there everyday anyway, just grab it on my way home.

Something that has been discussed is having a central mail location that would serve, for example, all of the houses on a single Minneapolis block face. This would allow USPS to be more efficient in mail delivery, and it could have several lockers built in for packages.

Of course, this will just be a temporary solution until I get my Amazon Drone helipad installed on my roof.

Which neighbor would get the pleasure of having this in their yard? And who would cover the cost, sans formal resident associations in Mpls? http://www.americanbuildersoutlet.com/s ... maxpl.html

Also, most of those stations don't have enough room for packages either.

Before you dismiss it too quickly, consider that it's available in Dapper Tan.

Presumably, it would be located in the public ROW on the boulevard. And it doesn't take much imagination to see that it could be expanded slightly and have a lot more package space. Not sure who would pay for it.

Again, I'm not saying it's necessarily the perfect answer. But if it were between that and not getting mail delivery because the USPS can't afford to deliver it?

I know someone that lives in some suburban subdivision in Shoreview and her neighborhood has something like that instead of mailboxes in front of each house.

And who would cover the cost, sans formal resident associations in Mpls?

Having stuff dropped in some central automated place like an Amazon locker or your local store in theory makes the whole process cheaper

And I guess the related question is, why do you think some other retailer is going to want to rent a bunch of prime commercial real estate to store the packages that some other company is making the profit off of? I guess it's one thing if Amazon, for example, pays for the locker space to house its deliveries, but people do e-commerce with lots of companies besides Amazon, and they're not all going to have their own lockers.

I could see the package carriers themselves doing it themselves, because it could probably save them money. Or since this conversation started because of apartments no longer taking packages, could you put something there?

There was a product geared toward this issue on Shark Tank tonight, basically a set of lock boxes for mailing and receiving packages or dry cleaning or whatever, and no one bought into the concept. Kind of surprising.

Instacart, a grocery delivery service, is firing all drivers in the Twin Cities market.

“Given the market’s size and geographic layout, we’ve found it difficult to efficiently provide enough opportunities for delivery drivers to receive orders,” Instacart said in an email to its Minneapolis drivers on Friday. “As our market has evolved, we’ve found that the delivery driver service is not the best fit for the Minneapolis market at this time.”

http://www.buzzfeed.com/williamalden/in ... #.hh2e1MDz
In other markets Instacart operates in orders are delivered by shoppers. Seems the Twin Cities geography is not optimal to keep drivers busy enough.

Or it's easier to blame it on geography than a bad business plan.

So I saw I still had the article open and so i actually read it.

Instacart is still operating in the market, splitting shoppers and drivers is an experiment they're working on, and it didn't work here.

Garages turning into "great rooms"

http://www.startribune.com/streetscapes ... 374273951/

I always love walking around my neighborhood seeing in to my neighbors' garages to see what they're using it for. Sometimes a workshop, an office studio, sometimes game room, often storage.

I can say I haven't yet seen a great room.