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Delivering packages seems like a task that could be easily automated. But, in fact, it’s complicated. Customers are often not at home to receive packages, and so delivery people need to know if they can leave the package safely and where to leave it, whether they should ring a neighbor’s doorbell instead, and so on. Cities present additional problems, since many buildings don’t have doormen and there are typically multiple apartment units in a single building. For a human, dealing with these challenges is reasonably easy, if annoying. How a drone would deal with them is a bit of a mystery.

The genius of the current system, from the customer’s perspective, is that most of the labor of delivery is performed by the person doing the delivering. If I’m not home when my package arrives, the UPS guy knows to leave it with one of the other people in my building. Or, if none of the neighbors are home, they’ll just come back later. I don’t have to do anything, or commit to being anywhere, to get my package. I order it. It arrives. (That’s what makes the rare cases when this isn’t true—like when the U.S.P.S. guy leaves a notice requesting that I trek down to the post office to pick up a package—incredibly annoying.)

Shifting most deliveries to drones would complicate this picture considerably.

Amazon and UPS are investigating package delivery via automated flying drones, but a New York Times profile of Google’s recent interest in robotics lays out an interesting hypothetical situation: imagine a self-driving car pulling up in your driveway, and a robot getting out to deliver your package instead of a living, breathing UPS human bedecked in brown.

Flying parcel-carriers are the next logical frontier for delivery companies

Sources familiar with the company’s plans say it has been testing and evaluating different approaches to drone delivery. Asked for a comment, a company spokesman said that, “The commercial use of drones is an interesting technology and we’ll continue to evaluate it.

In some ways, say industry experts, this is no surprise. “I would be shocked if a company like UPS wasn’t considering this,” says Ryan Calo, a law professor specializing in drones and robotics. “If you want to compete in logistics and delivery, drones and unmanned robots have to be part of the conversation about where things are headed.”

I think the large retailers we talked to are cautious this year. they do expect to see increased sales. We don’t think it’s going to be a huge increase over last year.I think it’s going to be a little more of a cliff hanger, though, because of this tighter shopping season. All of us, u.p.s. and all the retailers will waiting to see as customers realize they don’t have as many days left to finish their shipping. Myself included as a bad procrastinator. We’ll see a big rush, actually, the week before christmas and our largest day will be December 16th when we pick up over 34 million packages.