Spain and logistics: God bless Amazon…
Yesterday, Saturday, my wife and I realized in the afternoon that a friend was coming over for lunch today and that we had forgotten to buy her a gift. We knew it was available at the El Corte Inglés department store, the market leader in Spain, so we tried their website. We found the article, and the page said it could be delivered in less than two hours. Despite the traditional historical delays of the leading department stores in Spain with respect to electronic commerce and some previous bad experiences with them, we decided to give it another chance.
The SMS sequence captured in the illustration shows the result: order placed at 15:56, and received at home at 17:38. Less than two hours. No incidents or problems of any kind.
For those of us already of a certain age, these types of things no longer fall into the category of “electronic commerce” or “logistics”: it fall under “magic”. Of course, the first thing is to congratulate El Corte Inglés, an organization almost eighty years old, because it seems to be adapting to the times and facing up to the pressures of the current competitive landscape. Until recently, El Corte Inglés seemed to be headed the same route as Woolworth’s, the American chain that was unable to modernize, grew old with its customers and ended up closing.
The arrival of Amazon to Spain in September 2011, has turned the distribution sector upside down. The pressure that Amazon has subjected the sector to, with increasingly fast logistics and accurate delivery windows, reached its zenith with the launch of Amazon Prime Now in Madrid and Barcelona: a growing number of people started to realize that it was perfectly possible to place an order and have it at home in less than two hours.
Logistics in two hours is fast becoming the new standard for consumers: click on a page, and open the door to the delivery person a couple of hours later, with all that entails in terms of pressure for logistics operators who must address the revolution in their value chain or risk a series of possible vertical integrations. The next phase: distribution by drones and autonomous vehicles, promises even more aggressive changes that will force the industry to compete at an even higher level. Next generation logistics is the new competitive standard, and if your company is not able to get on the program, you may end up out of the market. We want what we want, and we want it now.
Back when Amazon arrived in Spain in September 2011, I said (pdf in Spanish): “blessed competition!” Not long ago, the idea of a traditional company like El Corte Inglés holding its own in electronic commerce and logistics to the point it could deliver in two hours seemed like science fiction. Yesterday, Saturday, I saw with my own eyes that the company is more than holding its. God bless Amazon and competition…
(En español, aquí)
