Tamara Hancock has placed over a dozen Amazon drone delivery orders since December 2024.
Courtesy of Tamara Hancock
This as-told-to essay is based on a conversation with Tamara Hancock, who lives in the greater Phoenix area — one of the first areas to have access to Amazon's Prime Air drone delivery service, which is expanding to 500 US cities by the end of the year. She's used the service over a dozen times and enjoys it for the convenience and fun. The following has been edited for length and clarity.We live in one of the very first pilot areas in the US for Amazon drone delivery.When I first saw that the service was available, I was like, "We're definitely trying this out!" I'm a professor and content creator, and the basis of the content on my channel is that I really like to learn and explore literally everything and find out how it works, from food to drone delivery.My daughter's a clarinet player, and I found out that a package of reeds could be delivered by drone, so I thought, why not? It's not something super fragile that, if dropped from a height, would break.I ordered it, picked the drone delivery option for $2.99, and immediately went to my backyard to wait the hour or so for the delivery. When the drone came, I hid myself partially under a tree, because if the optics on the drone sense a human or an animal, it will abort delivery and leave so that it doesn't hurt anybody or anything.After the package dropped, I took it inside, and we unpackaged everything. Everything was intact and great. It was awesome.It's cool to watch the dronesMy husband's an aerospace engineer, and my kids and I are really nerdy, so we get really excited about aviation and things like that. The drone warehouse is about three miles from us, and there's a road behind it that you can park on. You can see the drones taking off and landing there, and we like to park there and spot them.I've probably used Amazon drone delivery over a dozen times, both for the convenience and for the sake of content. I just gauge whether I want to pay the extra few dollars to have it delivered.It's worth it to me because of the price of gas. For me to go to the music store and buy those reeds, it would cost way more. Sometimes, though, it's not worth the price difference.
