Competing with Amazon

Dear online retailers who are not Amazon

My letter box is very small. I work for a living, pretty much every day and not usually from my house. Therefore, if I order things over the Internet for delivery what I mean by this is that I want them sent to my office.

Amazon invariably manages this. If you're an online retailer and your best stab at competing with Amazon is to whimper about only being able to deliver to the cardholder's address - a problem that Amazon somehow manages to solve thousands (millions?) of times every day - the service you're really offering is to deliver a "sorry we missed you card" to my house, leaving me to schlep out to my local depot next weekend. That's not the same as competing with Amazon. That's limiting your target market to

• homeworkers
• students
• the unemployed and
• people with grotesquely over-sized letterboxes.

Good luck with that.

(HT my friend Nicolai, who reminds me that everyone who works for a living sooner or later encounters this utterly bizarre "delivery" model)