An article in the Wall Street Journal (April 24,2014) titled “Amazon, in a Threat to UPS, tries its own deliveries”, describes a plan by Amazon in San Francisco, Los Angeles and New York, to operate its own Amazon logo delivery trucks for customer home delivery. It claims that control over the last mile by Amazon will prevent the delivery issues of the kind faced by UPS last Christmas, and provide competitive same day delivery. It also claims that shipping costs have been rising for Amazon. Will Amazon’s control over the last mile permit it to reduce costs over UPS and FedEx ? Will the need for dense delivery volumes to optimize costs require deliveries to be delayed until such routes are formed ? Will control over deliveries permit easier implementation of Amazon’s plans for anticipated shipments (described in an earlier blog) ?