BY MARK B. SOLOMON, EXECUTIVE EDITOR – NEWS
DEMAND-DRIVEN DISTRIBUTION
CAN NIGEL THOMAS BECOME NEW YORK
City’s parcel locker king? The odds are clearly
stacked against him. Major players like UPS Inc.,
Amazon.com, and the U.S. Postal Service (USPS)
would seem poised to claim parcel locker supremacy in the nation’s biggest market. By contrast,
Thomas’s company, Brooklyn-based GoLocker, less
than a year old, has lockers in just five locations in
the New York borough.
But Thomas, 39, is thinking big. He has set his
sights on densely populated areas like Manhattan’s
Lower East Side, an area packed with multi-unit
apartment buildings that generally don’t have door-men or concierges to accept packages. He believes
that GoLocker’s business model, which is based on
setting up urban distribution centers where the big
delivery firms can drop off packages and avoid making costly and time-consuming residential deliveries, will gain substantial traction. Thomas is also
banking on his 14 years of experience as a system
engineer at FedEx Corp. to work in his favor because
he brings an understanding of logistics practices that
he thinks his rivals don’t have. GoLocker charges a
flat fee ranging from $1.99 a package to $14.99 for
unlimited monthly deliveries to lockers. There is no
charge to drop off a package.
Thomas may never rule New York’s parcel locker
domain. But he could carve out a profitable niche.
That’s because the U.S. market is still uncharted
territory. Since November, UPS has pilot tested
self-service lockers at nine locations in Chicago;
a decision on whether to expand or modify the
program, continue as is, or pull the plug will likely
be made by the end of October, according to Kalin
Robinson, director of new product development for
the Atlanta-based shipping and logistics giant. USPS
has manual lockers—units that are opened with a
key—inside many of its post offices. Since 2012, it
has run a pilot program using automated lockers
located around post offices in the Northern Virginia
suburbs of Washington, D.C. The program, called
“GoPost,” was expanded in 2013 to Brooklyn and
Manhattan. FedEx Corp. has 80 locker locations
in Dallas and its home base of Memphis, Tenn.,
through its “FedEx Ship & Get” program. Amazon
launched its locker program four years ago and
today has lockers in six states. The Seattle-based
specialreport
“Just drop it in
my locker”
Consumers are embracing parcel lockers,
where they can retrieve (and often return)
parcel shipments at their convenience. Delivery
firms are taking note.
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