Amazon has struck a deal with the US Postal Service that’ll see its customers taking delivery of packages on Sundays.
The service is set to launch on November 17 – in time for Black Friday as well as the busy holiday season – and will initially cover Los Angeles and New York metropolitan areas, with plans to expand it to “a large portion of the US population” during 2014. Dallas, Houston, New Orleans, and Phoenix are already being lined up for the extra delivery day.
According to Dave Clark, Amazon’s vice president of worldwide operations, the same service is also coming later this month to London, UK, though there Amazon will use its own trucks to make the deliveries.
The Seattle-based company said that customers in an area eligible for the new service will see a Sunday delivery notification at checkout, although it appears they won’t be able to select Sunday as a delivery day.
According to a Wall Street Journal report, Amazon will take ordered items from its warehouses to USPS locations on Saturday evenings or Sunday mornings, with the postal service taking responsibility from there.
As the WSJ points out, Amazon’s move is its “latest effort to chip away at a key advantage for brick-and-mortar retailers: immediacy.”
The USPS, which could do with the extra business, says for now it’ll use its current employees to operate the new Sunday service, having spent the last year working on establishing a flexible workforce capable of covering the whole week. However, a spokesperson acknowledged it could take on more staff as the service expands across the nation.
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