[latj]

Doing 1-day delivery to the majority of your customers in U.S. is easier than you might think-- You just put fulfillment centers within 1 day of the east coast. There's a UPS hub in Louisville and a Fedex hub in Memphis. Those areas are also 1-day to east coast, the rent is cheap, and the locals will give you all sorts of concessions for bringing in jobs. I have seen one Amazon subsidiary that was capable of doing same-day deliver to a large portion of their customers 10 years ago. The trick is to make it cost effective. People pay for different classes of shipping from various vendors-- but getting the order to you as quickly as possible isnt the most profitable way to do business. There are sweat spots where they minimize the cost of shipping but its still "fast enough". Take for example shipments out of the continental U.S.. Every carrier has ways to pool packages in ways that make them cheaper to ship. The shipping still costs you the same, but it'll arrive later. Most of the time you'll be fine with waiting. The times you're not you'll complain and they'll upgrade shipping.

[DrScump]

  a Fedex hub in Memphis

BTW, that was the original FedEx hub. Back in the early 1980s (at least), every FedEx overnight package went through Memphis, even if shipper and destination were on the same coast as each other.