Drop Density
Break a delivery day into its parts and you find that driving is not the main event. Depending on whose time-and-motion study you read and how dense the round is, the driving between stops in a city can be a third of the day or less. The rest is dwell: parking, finding the parcel in the back, walking, waiting, scanning, photographing, walking back. The van is stationary far more than it is moving, which is one reason it is such an aggravating object to have on your street.
The single most important number in this business, and the one that explains almost every strategic decision made by every delivery company on earth, is drop density — the number of parcels you can deliver per unit of area or per unit of time. Everything follows from it.
If you have eighty stops on a suburban round spread over fifteen square kilometres, you spend your life driving. If you have eighty stops in four adjacent streets, you park once and walk. The difference in cost per parcel between those two rounds can be a factor of three or four. This is why urban delivery is cheap and rural delivery is ruinous; why the person in the remote glen pays a surcharge or is simply told the retailer does not deliver there; why every operator's map of a country is really a map of population density with a price gradient laid over it.
It is also why the industry is obsessed with volume in a way that looks, from outside, like ordinary corporate greed and is in fact something more interesting. Volume is not just revenue. Volume changes the cost structure. If a company doubles the number of parcels it delivers in a given town without changing the town, its stops get closer together, its vans get fuller, its drivers walk further and drive less, and the cost per parcel falls — not because of any efficiency in the usual sense, but because geometry has been kind. This is a real and powerful economy of scale, and it is unusually local. You cannot import density from another city. You have to win it street by street.
