As Amazon, erstwhile online book dealer turned all-providing mother, continues its slow incursion into our brick-and-mortar world by putting its stamp on convenience stores and grocery stores, creating robot assistants to take care of you at home, cars to run in our streets, and drones to fill up our skies, the question remains: When can we finally just live inside Amazon? How much longer must these cursed physical and metaphorical walls separate us, our mouths suckling at the empty air in want of Amazon’s life-sustaining phantom teat? According to The Wall Street Journal, probably not too much longer, given that Amazon is about to set up some Amazon lockers right there inside your apartment building.
The slowly seeping omnipresence that sells DVDs sometimes has partnered with some of the biggest apartment operators in America (AvalonBay Communities, Bozzuto Group, Equity Residential, Greystar—you know, the big boys) to install Amazon-branded package rooms to house all the Amazon stuff that just naturally accrues by dint of you being a sentient being. Some 850,000 units will soon have a designated place to put that stuff, the daily sorting of which causes a real headache for landlords.
Now that system will all be handled automatically, as all deliveries—whether from Amazon, or companies and government services that have not yet been acquired by Amazon—will be placed inside these Amazon Hubs, while the Amazon customer will receive an Amazon message containing an Amazon code to open it. Landlords, meanwhile, may return to their Amazon apartments to relax and order more Amazon products of their own, all while awaiting their inevitable replacement by Amazon.
The Wall Street Journal reports that Amazon will charge owners of those apartment buildings a mere $10,000 to $20,000 to purchase those lockers, after which, quite generously, no additional fees will be assessed. They need never trouble themselves again, in fact. Their every desire will be anticipated and fulfilled by Amazon, until eventually we are all serenely floating inside the warm, amniotic goo of our Amazon Womb, fed a steady diet of nutrients and Transparent episodes through the guaranteed two-day stream of our Amazon fallopian tubes. Won’t that be nice? Won’t it be… Prime?