Home Deliveries

Delivering hot food to the home has become a huge business with tens of thousands of food couriers with scooters, mopeds and cars (all with expensive food delivery insurance!) bringing all kinds of takeout meals from burgers and pizzas to full banquets complete with wine to our doors. This has been fueled partly by the Covid epidemic, which prevented millions of people from visiting their favourite takeaways or restaurants, and massive advertising campaigns from delivery companies like Just Eat and Deliveroo.

At the same time home parcel deliveries have boomed as well. Covid lockdowns forced all but the most essential, shops to close but odering goods online for delivery straight to the door was allowed; a great boost for companies like Amazon who had to take on hundreds of additional drivers. A great boost for the insurance industry too; all those drivers needed expensive delivery driver (hire and reward) insurance, which quickly became a big seller! As they say, it is an ill wind that blows no-one any good - even robbing insurers.

From a standing start in 1994, trading from Jeff Bezos' garage, Amazon has grown into one of the most valuable companies in the world. Launched initially as a bookseller it soon branched out into selling all kinds of other products and it is difficult to think of a single thing you would want to buy that they don't stock.

Apart from selling products themselves they also act as a market place for smaller distributors and many of these have built successful businesses on this platform. There have been accusations, however, that Amazon itself has taken over markets of products that these businesses have proved to be worth exploiting, leaving the original sellers out on a limb.