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Uber wants to deliver clothes and jewelry from fancy stores

Uber wants to deliver clothes and jewelry from fancy stores

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Uber is currently testing a same-day delivery program for high-end retailers, according to a report from TechCrunch. As many as 400 brands including Louis Vuitton, Tiffany’s, Hugo Boss, and Neiman Marcus are in talks with the company, with some of these merchants already testing out the new delivery service.

this is just the latest in Uber's many delivery experiments

Delivering items for stores would be the latest attempt by Uber to find new uses for its logistical network. Last year, the company launched UberRush — a Manhattan-only courier service that has since expanded to new locations — and it's also tried its hand at delivering essentials like toiletries. After successful trials in Barcelona and Los Angeles, the company also expanded its food delivery service UberEats to New York City and Chicago. A leaked driver's manual for the new merchant delivery program shows that at some point the company wants to integrate these services together. In the future, an Uber driver might have a passenger in the back seat, and a package up front.

As Uber CEO Travis Kalanick confidently asserted back in 2013: "Once you're delivering cars in five minutes, there's a lot of things you can deliver in five minutes." However, TechCrunch's report suggests the delivery game is not quite as straightforward as that. When it came to merchant delivery, Uber reportedly considered serving large retailers like Amazon and eBay to begin with. However, it found that sourcing inventory from warehouses was too much of a headache, and so switched to picking up items from smaller stores instead. Even for a behemoth like Uber, it seems some packages are a little too tricky to deliver on time.