Vested Interests

Localnet is highly disruptive and hence stands to make a lot of enemies. Some of the key ones - and strategies to mitigate their opposition are outlined below.

Courier and Postal Companies

The plethora of home delivery networks that have built up over the last few years stand to lose most of their business while even the established players in long distance shipping - such as UPS, TNT, FedEx and the like would find their operations gradually pared back to the backbone services between delivery centres. Their articulated lorries and airplane fleets would be largely unaffected but the smaller vans and legions of delivery drivers would no longer be required.

As far as the individuals go, there will be a similar number of posts within the localnet system - and these should be more varied and more sociable roles with more interaction with customers and less driving each day. It is the businesses though that will see negative growth as localnet's spread eats away at their sorting offices' load. Rather than force them to lay off staff as localnets open, there should be planned migration of staff from these companies into the localnet delivery teams.

Local Shops and Businesses

An existing village shop will struggle to compete with one located inside a LocalHub. It might be possible to find some way of giving local shopkeepers preferential access to the operating leases of business within or around the LocalHub.

Local businesses are often too small to warrant dedicated delivery and collection vehicles and actually lose a lot of business to neighbouring towns and cities. If they relocate to the LocalHub or are well served by pickups and drop-offs from it, they can offer services to local customers more cost effectively than their more distant competitors.

Local Bus and Taxi Companies

Short-hop bus routes will be affected by localnet. The delivery vans will pick up and drop off customers on all of the minor roads that they have to cover for their rounds anyway. These “feeder services” will let the bus companies concentrate their services on the main roads. There is likely to be less need for the smaller buses currently used on country routes.

Local taxi firms may also be impacted as many of their fares could instead use the localnet vans to access nearby stations or town centres. There may be a migration of driving jobs from the local bus and taxi services to the localnet delivery network.

Supermarkets

As people move to daily rather than weekly shopping, the footfall at large supermarkets will change. There should be less need for huge hypermarkets. If one's shopping can be sent home via localnet, there is less need to take the car to the supermarket. Without the threat of having to lug heavy bags home, it becomes viable to jump on a localnet van and leave the car at home. With staples re-orderable with a click or two, no delivery charge and same day delivery, the things we would want to go to a supermarket for will change. We're less likely to be filling an entire trolley with the week's shopping and more interested in browsing, tasting and trying things on.

The role of supermarkets in the LocalHub requires careful thought. No doubt the supermarket chains would see each LocalHub as a potential “mini-mart” - but this could limit customer choice as each resident will only have access to one. It may be better if all of the supermarkets can take orders from customers in any localnet area and then ship whole OmniPods of boxes to the LocalHub overnight. This gives customers more choice and lets the supermarkets run their larger pick and fetch operations much as they do at the moment - but without each having their own fleet of 3.5 tonne vans to deliver them to the end customer.