The New, Improved Generation of Instant Delivery Services

It's no secret that e-commerce is cutting into the traditional shopping custom of actually going to a store. As Dan Glass points out in his exhaustive piece on the future of city freight systems, Americans drummed up $262 billion in online retail sales in 2013, with that number expected to hit $370 billion by the time this sentence is written (all right, by 2017). But for all the thrill of the click-and-buy, there's still the painful delivery wait that follows: a couple days to a week of forgetting about the order, perhaps regretting it, then getting excited all over again when it arrives.

Well, we may not have to wait long for the end of waiting. There's a new generation of city delivery services that aim to make the delivery element of e-commerce as instantaneously fulfilling as the purchase itself. The general model is that city residents tell these services what items they want, and the services send someone to go get it, often within an hour. The actual retailer is cut out of the loop. Food is just the tip of the iceberg: if it can be purchased in the city, it's fair game. This is pizza delivery-meets-everything that's not pizza. (And, still, pizza.)