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by mindslight 3710 days ago
Space/weight limits of trucks are not the critical factor - sure, they're "infinite" if you insist on thinking in the wrong paradigm.

This isn't the Internet where links have a bounded capacity and zero marginal cost. The trucks/planes have their schedule - more packages mean more fuel is used, not exhaustion of discrete slots. Delivery services do not make money by queuing packages.
1 comments
surrealvortex 3710 days ago
What? Trucks do have a bounded capacity. A truck cannot carry more than x kgs of packages or y liters of volume. Are you arguing against that?

If Amazon had asked for a single truck from UPS at 5 PM from warehouse A (the number of trucks ordered is a business decision), it can only allocate x kgs of packages or y liters of volume to that resource.

Edit: Just to clarify, the number of trucks may often be decided waaay in advance.

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mindslight 3709 days ago
I'm arguing that the capacity of the truck generally does not matter. A toilet bowl has a bounded capacity too. But by the time you're thinking about it, you have a different sort of problem.

The cutoff windows they do give are too long to support your theory (what if demand then spikes?), unless Amazon also retracts those windows (which would also be customer hostile). I'm not saying the constraints you describe are impossible, just highly unlikely based on how every other merchant/shipper works. The tiny gain from optimally packing trucks does not seem to outweigh the additional complexity required to do so.

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