With online retail taking a bigger chunk out of brick-and-mortar businesses, shipping and fulfillment services are becoming a commodity in their own right. How fast can you get it to my doorstep? One place you might not expect online retail to be turning into a way of life, though, is rural Alaska.
Betsy Brennan, who works at a radio station in Nome, three blocks from the Bering Sea, and hundreds of miles from Alaska’s road system, has an auto-order set up through online retail giant Amazon’s Prime service so that office essentials like paper towels, printer cartridges, and coffee arrive regularly by mail.
Prime’s popularity is exploding across rural Alaska because of the free shipping that comes with the $99 annual subscription fee. Brennan set up her household account two years ago for things one could easily take for granted in places that are accessible by road. “Really heavy items like flour,” she explained. “All kinds of food items that we pay a lot more for locally. Or very similar.”
For thrifty shoppers with discretionary income, the most cost-effective way of running a household used to be loading up on supplies at wholesale stores in Anchorage, then mailing them back home, or packing them into checked bags on commercial flights. For Brennan and others, the service is a huge time-saver, and that is a big part of the appeal for placing online orders. “It comes, many times, right to your doorstep.”
Prime also does not charge anything extra for heavy items, even if they may not be eligible for two-day delivery. “We had a friend that ordered a wood-splitter through Amazon Prime,” Brennan said matter-of-factly, “a fairly heavy item.” She summarized a few other orders from around town: dozens of bags of potting soil, bird-seed, and a $1,200 grill. A local sled-dog racer had even started ordering pallets of dog food.
Amazon is not a shipper itself. Instead, it takes advantage of where the U.S. Postal Service and freight companies already go. In doing so, it is bringing eCommerce further into markets where it has not had much of a foothold. For example, Unalakleet, 145 miles from Nome (by air), with around 700 residents, including Jeff Erickson, who has been using Amazon more and more over the last six years.
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