I was surprised today to discover that there’s now an Amazon Locker just half amile from my house. I live in Thatcham, which is far from the City of London where we’ve previously spotted the lockers.
The locker is by the rear entrance to the shop next to the photo booth, situated in the area normally reserved for logs and BBQ charcoal. There’s plenty of space in this Co-op for the Locker and shop staff tell me they’ve seen it used a couple of times but expect it’ll be used a lot more towards Christmas.
Thatcham is a relatively small town 4 miles from Newbury with a population of around 25,000 and roughly 12000 houses. In truth it’s not much bigger than a village and has a registered village green in the Broadway, the town centre.
For Amazon to consider Thatcham as a venue for an Amazon Locker means one of two things – Either there’s an unusually high percentage of Thatcham’s population who shop on Amazon (which wouldn’t surprise me) and/or Amazon are starting to deploy a much larger number of Lockers in the suburbs and rural parts of the country.
Have you got an Amazon Locker in your local Co-op store? If you’ve spotted one let us know whereabouts in the country you’re based and whether it’s a rural, town or city location.
4 Responses
Lockers are the future! No more waiting at home for deliveries, you can collect them when it’s convenient to you. We are glad that they are now coming to the forefront and people are seeing how easy they are to use! We have lockers all over the country; 450 to be precise with this number going up each week. They are located on petrol stations, supermarkets and other convenient locations. The closest to Thatcham is the Tesco store at Newbury. The advantage with the ByBox lockers is that you can get any online delivery there, not just one specific retailer.
There’s one in the Ecclesall Road Co-Op in Sheffield, it’s an area with a high student population and on one of the major routes into the city so I guess it ticks a couple of good boxes for them
We have a similar-looking item behind our local Tesco, but it’s grey…..
What are these things for?
I am intrigued by the claim that with a population of around 25,000 Thatcham is “not much bigger than a village”.
If you care to look around the Country as a whole you will find that there are Cities(such as Truro) that do not have a population of 25,000. Indeed there are hundreds of quite important Market Towns, Administration Centres, County Towns across the Country that do not have a population of 25,000.
May I suggest that on Sunday you go for a run in the Country. As you drive along the byways of Britain you will find many many Villages(Villages are usually about 3-4 miles apart on average)that have a population of a few hundred up to a few thousand. The Village I live in has a population of about 300 or so people.
Of course there are even smaller communities. These are Hamlets which have populations that could go down to just a dozen or so up to about a hundred or so.
Obviously closer to the very over crowded South East the villages may be larger because they are mainly dormitories for the larger towns and cities(especially London). I would imagine that there are a significant number of Thatcham inhabitants who commute each day into London or Reading or Newbury or Oxford or perhaps who work at such places as Heathrow Airport.
Years ago Thatcham will have been a village. Certainly the last time I was there I seem to remember that it had a relatively small Town Centre but in every direction there were quite extensive Housing Estates. Many looking as if they had been built Post War and many probably having been built over the last 20 years.
When I used to take a Specialist Book Stall around the Events. Thatcham was a place I called at fairly regularly. It was the first place on the route home(I would Wholesale on my way home from a Retail Event)where I could do the Banking(I never liked carrying lots of spare cash in the Van). There had to be a branch of the Bank that I used and I had to be able to park conveniently both of which was possible in Thatcham.
Also I used to visit Thatcham regularly because the Wholesaler who covered London and the South East lived there. If I ran out of some stock on the road when Wholesaling rather than coming back to Cornwall it was often more convenient to go and see him, and draw on his stock.
But 25,000 is a sizeable town in its own right.