Look, Up in the Sky: Are Delivery Drones in Our Future?

We’re not going to try to kid you: when you’re in the mailroom management business, you pay attention to what Amazon.com does. I mean, a lot of attention. Amazon is the world’s largest online retailer, and chances are that a significant portion of the packages and parcels that come through your mailroom come from Amazon.

This is true whether you’re a residential property manager, work in campus housing, or even in the healthcare or hospitality setting. It seems like everyone on the planet is shopping on Amazon, and that means a lot of packages.

We like lots of packages. Lots of packages mean lots of packages to keep track of, and we happen to have the very best way to do it. Using the EZTrackIt package tracking software, you can log those Amazon packages the moment they arrive on your site, and keep track of them right up until the moment your resident accepts delivery. The whole package logging system’s cloud-based, so you never have to worry about lost data or system crashes – but that’s not what this story is about.

No, today we’re talking about delivery drones. If you missed the 60 Minutes story, and the approximately 300,000 news stories that followed in its wake, you missed Amazon founder Jeff Bezos spilling the beans on Amazon’s latest innovation: unmanned flying delivery drones, which will be used to bring Amazon customers their packages that weigh less than 5 pounds in under 30 minutes. The service is going to be called Amazon Prime Air.

I’m a tech guy. I’ve got to admit that this is a pretty cool scenario – but I’m also enough of a tech guy to know that it’s a long walk from idea to execution. Even a project as relatively simple as developing the EZTrackIt package tracking software Android App took a good amount of time. Bezos’s projected timeline of 4-5 years may be overly ambitious, given the difficulties inherent in introducing an entirely new technology, which has only had military and para-military applications heretofore, into the civilian marketplace.

That means one thing for us:

Amazon will still be filling up our mailrooms – but we don’t need to build any drone docking stations just yet!