What you need to know
- Apple is making plans to speed up shipping times.
- Brick-and-mortar retail stores will become shipping hubs.
- This is becoming common practice within the retail industry.
Apple will begin using its hundreds of retail stores across the U.S. and Canada as shipping hubs for purchases made online, a plan intended to mitigate shipping delays. According to Bloomberg, this process will speed up shipping times to online shoppers who will be able to get items shipped from local areas instead of from one of its distribution centers, or straight from China.
Apple told staff the shift will mean faster delivery times for customers who live further from distribution centers than from stores, according to the people who asked not to be identified discussing internal policies. The products will be shipped through United Parcel Service Inc. in Canada and FedEx Corp. in the U.S. via ground shipping and may be delivered as early as the day after a customer's order, Apple told its staff. The program will apply to customers who live within 100 miles from a store, the people said.
This disbursement of products for shipping is a new trend in retail designed to reduce shipping times, improve margins, and ease the environmental impact.
This isn't anything customers will see change on their end. It's all being taken care of on Apple's side.
Customers won't be able to choose to have their orders shipped from a store nor will they be aware when it happens. The decision on where to ship an item from is decided by Apple's operations team, the people said.
Reduced shipping times and easing the environmental impact sounds like a win across the board, both for retailers like Apple and consumers like us. Let's hope it means we see faster shipment dates for the iPhone 12 than we did for the Apple Watch Series 6.
