Look, high in the sky! It’s a can of soup!

Exactly ten years ago, Amazon unveiled a program that aimed to revolutionize shopping and shipping. Drones launched from a central hub fly through the sky and deliver just about anything anyone needs. They would be fast, innovative and ubiquitous – all hallmarks of Amazon.

The buzzing announcement, made by Jeff Bezos on ’60 Minutes’ as part of a Cyber ​​Monday promotional package, it attracted worldwide attention. “I know this seems like science fiction. That is not the case,” says Bezos, Amazon’s founder and CEO at the time. The drones would be “ready for commercial operations as soon as the necessary regulations are in place,” probably in 2015. the company said.

Eight years later, drone delivery is a reality – sort of – on the outskirts of College Station, Texas, northwest of Houston. That’s a significant achievement for a program that has waxed and waned over the years and lost many of its early leaders to newer and more urgent projects.

Yet the business as it exists now is so disappointing that the only way Amazon can keep the drones in the air is by giving things away. Years of toil by top scientists and aerospace specialists has produced a program that sends Listerine Cool Mint Breath Strips or a can of Campbell’s Chunky Minestrone with Italian Sausage – but not both at the same time – as gifts to customers. If this is science fiction, it’s played for laughs.

Ten years is an eternity in technology, yet drone delivery doesn’t approach the scale or simplicity of Amazon’s original promotional videos. This gap between dazzling claims and everyday reality is ever-present in Silicon Valley. Self-driving cars, the metaverse, flying cars, robots, neighborhoods or even cities built from scratch, virtual universities that can rival Harvard, artificial intelligence – the list of delayed and incomplete promises is long.

“Having ideas is easy,” says Rodney Brooks, a robotics entrepreneur and frequent critic of tech company hype. “It is difficult to make them become reality. It is even more difficult to deploy them on a large scale.”

Amazon said last month that drone deliveries would be expanded to Britain, Italy and another unidentified US city by the end of 2024. But even on the cusp of growth, a question lingers. Now that drones finally exist in at least a limited form, why did we think we needed them in the first place?

Dominique Lord and Leah Silverman live in College Station’s drone zone. They are Amazon fans and regularly place orders for ground delivery. Drones are another matter, even though the service is free for Amazon Prime members. While it’s cool to literally have stuff land in your driveway, there are a lot of hurdles to getting stuff this way, at least the first few times.

Only one item can be delivered at a time. He must not weigh more than five pounds. It should not be too big. It can’t be something fragile since the drone drops it from 10 feet. The drones cannot fly if it is too hot, too windy or too rainy.

You need to be at home to take out the landing target and make sure a porch pirate doesn’t run off with your item or it doesn’t roll into the street (which happened once with Mr. Lord and Mrs. Silverman). But your car is not allowed to be in the driveway. Landing the drone in the backyard avoids some of these problems, but not if there are trees.

Amazon has also warned customers that drone deliveries will not be available during periods of high demand for drone deliveries.

The other active U.S. testing site is Lockeford, California, in the Central Valley. On a recent afternoon, the Lockeford lot seemed largely doomed, with only three cars in the parking lot. Amazon said it was delivering via drones in Lockeford and arranged for a New York Times reporter to return to the location. It also arranged an interview with David Carbon, the former Boeing executive who heads the drone program. The company later canceled both without explanation.

A business blog post said on Oct. 18 that drones had safely delivered “hundreds” of household items in College Station since December, and customers could now have prescriptions delivered there. Lockeford was not mentioned.

After Ms. Silverman and Mr. Lord initially expressed interest in the drone program, Amazon offered $100 in gift cards in October 2022 to pursue. But their service didn’t start until June and was then suspended during a severe heat wave when the drones couldn’t fly.

However, the stimuli kept coming. The couple recently received an email from Amazon promoting Skippy Creamy Peanut Butter, which normally costs $5.38 but was a “free gift” while supplies lasted. They ordered it, and moments later a drone dropped a large box containing a small jar. Amazon said “some promotional items” are offered “as a welcome measure.”

“We don’t really need anything they offer for free,” said Ms. Silverman, a 51-year-old novelist and caregiver. “The drones feel more like toys than anything – toys that waste a huge amount of paper and cardboard.”

The weather in Texas is causing major problems for important deliveries. Mr. Lord, a 54-year-old professor of civil engineering at Texas A&M, ordered a drug through the mail. By the time he picked up the package, the medicine had melted. He is hopeful that the drones can eventually solve these kinds of problems.

“I still view this program positively knowing that it is in the experimental phase,” he said.

Amazon says its drones will improve over time. A new model, the MK30, was announced last year, and photos were released in October. The MK30, expected to enter service in late 2024, was touted for its longer range, ability to fly in bad weather and a 25 percent reduction in “perceived noise.”

When Amazon started working with drones years ago, the retailer needed two to three days to ship many items to customers. It worried it was vulnerable to potential competitors whose suppliers were more local, including Google and eBay. Drones were all about speed.

“We can do a half-hour delivery,” Mr. Bezos promised on “60 Minutes.”

For a while, drones were ‘the next big thing’. Google has developed its own drone service Wing, which is now working with Walmart to deliver items in parts of Dallas and Frisco, Texas. Startups received funding – about $2.5 billion was invested between 2013 and 2019, according to the Teal Group, a space consultancy. The experienced venture capitalist Tim Draper said in 2013 that “everything from pizza delivery to personal shopping can be handled by drones.” Uber Eats announced a food delivery drone at the end of 2019. The future was up in the air.

Amazon really started thinking long term. It envisioned, and patented, a drone delivery vehicle that would hover at 15,000 feet in the air. That’s more than commercial planes, but Amazon said it could use the vehicles to deliver a hot dinner to customers.

But in practice, progress has been slow, sometimes for technical reasons and sometimes because of the company’s corporate DNA. The same aggressive confidence that created a multibillion-dollar business undermined Amazon’s efforts to work with the Federal Aviation Administration.

“The attitude was: ‘We are Amazon. We will convince the FAA,” said a former Amazon drone executive, who requested anonymity because he was not authorized to speak on the subject. “The FAA wants companies to come in with great humility and great transparency. That is not Amazon’s strength.”

A more complicated problem was getting the technology to the point where it was safe not just most of the time, but always. The first drone to land on someone’s head or take off with a cat in hand sets the program back ten years, especially if it is filmed.

“Part of the DNA of the tech industry is that you can achieve things you never thought you could achieve,” says Neil Woodward, who spent four years as a senior manager in Amazon’s drone program. “But the truth is that the laws of physics don’t change.”

Mr. Woodward, now retired, worked for years at NASA in the astronaut program before moving to the private sector.

“When you work for the government, you have 535 people on your board of directors” – he was referring to Congress – “and a good chunk of them want to take away your funding because they have other priorities,” he said. “That makes government agencies very risky. At Amazon you get a lot of rope, but it can go over your skis.”

Ultimately there has to be a market. As Mr. Woodward put it, using an old Silicon Valley cliché: “Do the dogs like the dog food? Sometimes the dogs don’t do that.”

Archie Conner, 82, lives a few doors down from Mr. Lord and Mrs. Silverman. He sees drones less as a retail innovation and more as a marketing innovation.

“When you hear a drone, you naturally think of Amazon. It’s really out-of-the-box thinking, even if no one orders,” he says. “Drones were recently in the news. People say, ‘Wow, Amazon did that.’”

Mr. Conner also ordered the free Skippy peanut butter, but forgot to set the landing target, so the drone took off. Then he ordered it again. Meanwhile, an Amazon delivery person came by with the first jar. So now he and his wife Belinda have two pots.

“We haven’t found much that we really want to pay for,” Mr. Conner said. “But we enjoyed the free peanut butter.”