Is the Amazon Prime truck at the Durango Mall picking up or dropping off? Probably dropping off since half the stores have abandoned the mall. Maybe this photo is the ultimate indignity. Either that, or this truck is a glimpse of the New World Order? Sign me, Smile.
Allow Action Line to deliver a correction.
The Amazon transportation unit is not a “truck.”
The blue cargo container thingy is a “trailer.” The motorized cab thingy in which the driver sits is a “tractor.”
Some might see this as half-baked semi semantics, but 18-wheelers are technically “tractor trailers.”
In the long haul, you get more traction by using proper lingo, lest we hear it from truculent truckers.
Now, what was the question again?
Ah, yes – what’s the deal with an Amazon Prime truck at the Durango Mall?
The rig was long gone by the time Action Line got the photo. Therefore, we have a “prime” opportunity for speculation, conspiracy theories and balderdash.
In other words, business as usual.
Speaking of which, Amazon has used branded trailers since 2015 to move stuff across the land.
Its trailers are hitched to tractors of independent drivers or trucking firms.
But Amazon, being Amazon, is changing all that.
Amazon is getting into the trucking business and becoming a full-blown logistics company.
The business press recently reported Amazon-logo tractors were seen at Kenworth and Volvo manufacturing facilities.
It shouldn’t come as a shock.
As a story in Business Insider pointed out, “In the span of several years, the retail giant has amassed dozens of cargo jets, about 10,000 truck trailers, a network of ocean freighters and thousands of last-mile delivery vans.”
The story came on the heels Amazon’s massive order of 100,000 electric delivery vans last September.
A Morgan Stanley analysis estimates that Amazon logistics now delivers more than half of all Amazon packages in America.
“It means Amazon, which now operates its own freighters and cargo planes, is accelerating its push to own the entire logistics chain and end its relationship with companies like FedEx and UPS,” reports the technology news website The Verge.
Meanwhile, back in Durango, the Amazon rig parked at the Durango Mall could be seen as super silly or supercilious.
See those stores in the background?
If you’ve lived here a while, you’ll remember that these retailers occupy the space that formerly was home to Kmart.
K-what?
Some might see an Amazon delivery vehicle at a former Kmart as akin to a killer returning to the scene of the crime.
But Kmart’s demise – the Durango store closed in 2003 – is widely seen as self-inflicted, the result of crushing debt load and lack of store investment.
And it didn’t help that Kmart, and just about every other brick-and-mortar retailer, generally ignored a brash online startup that was founded in 1994.
That little company was Amazon.
Internet retailing was growing, but Kmart largely ignored it and didn’t adapt.
As a result, the Kmart’s blue light dimmed.
Meanwhile, you might say Amazon just keeps on trucking.
Email questions to actionline@durangoherald.com or mail them to Action Line, The Durango Herald, 1275 Main Ave., Durango, CO 81301. You can request anonymity if your online video of coronavirus hoarding goes viral.
