[Nitramp]

These services are in part an answer to relatively high labour cost for low/semi-skilled work, in particular outside normal working hours.

That is, in European countries with strong labour laws and unions, it's relatively expensive to pay people to deliver packages when most people are at home (early evening hours). The obvious answer is something like the Packstation, replacing labour cost with machines.

The US has a much wider market for very low income jobs because the marginal cost are lower, thus US companies can make money with jobs like people guarding parking lots, something you hardly see in Northern Europe (the weather might play a role, though...).

So naturally, such solutions spring up earlier where the relative win is higher. Plus as others mentioned the denser/more urban life style.

That's not a clear win by the way, lots of relatively decent jobs for low skilled workers are lost to these machines. The machines are cheap, but it might still have been more efficient to pay slightly less to the delivery workers (and kept them in jobs).

[relix]

Very good points. Thanks for the insights!