Water Delivery
Water Delivery
[Caption above the frame:] Now that Amazon is advertising one-hour delivery of bottled water,
[A larger building complex is show on the left. An arrow goes to a blue bottle in a brown package in the middle of the frame. Another arrow continues over to Cueball on the right. The same building and Cueball is drawn below four more times. More and more bottles in packages are added. First two with a third arrow in between. Then six packages with water, so close that there are only smaller arrows at both ends. Then there is one long package from building to Cueball with 20 bottles close together, with small arrows at both ends of this package. Then finally this turns into a stream of water flowing through a package "pipe", shown with one arrow in the middle of the blue water. Again with small arrows at both ends of the pipe.]
[Caption below the frame:] I vote we start calling municipal plumbing "on-demand hyperloop-style water delivery" and see if we can sell anyone on the idea.

Amazon has added bottled water to its line of on-line home order goods, which they are calling Prime Now .  In served areas, which include Manhattan/Brooklyn , Baltimore , Atlanta , Miami , Dallas , Austin , Houston , Indianapolis , Chicago , Seattle , Portland , Los Angeles , Minneapolis , San Francisco , San Jose , San Antonio , Las Vegas , Sacramento , and Phoenix , many products – including but not limited to bottled water – are available to be delivered within one hour. So we are faced with the prospect of water, contained within plastic bottles, contained within cardboard shipping boxes.
As increasing amounts of water are ordered, on-demand, or as the delivery time decreases to even quicker than an hour, this would show increasing numbers of packages passing from Amazon HQ (or its distribution hubs) to an arbitrary end-user as shown in the comic.  Beyond a certain (already impractical) point, it might be better to merge packaging together into a single longitudinal structure through which one could first deliver back-to-back bottles of water, as shown in the second-to-bottom illustration, and then as water quantity needs increase beyond that model, eventually just 'pipe' the water without the plastic bottle or any packaging at all, as shown in the final illustration.  (This would also solve the problems of what happens with the packaging at the destination, or how to return it to the source to make it easier to re-use.)
While this could apply to one degree or another to any merchandise, for the purposes of the comic and for the reasons described next, water was chosen for this example – because that's really what existing water-mains do. And hence Randall 's recommendation or vote that we start calling the regular municipal plumbing "on-demand hyperloop-style water delivery." In order to promote any 'new' technology, various buzz-words are used, and here it is hyperloop , reminiscent of Elon Musk's ' piped transportation system ', which (from the outside, at least) appears to be taking discrete passenger units (trains, cars, buses and planes) and replacing them with a stationary pipe within which the passengers 'flow.' (Albeit, in this case, still within discrete internal vehicles, not entirely like Futurama's 'piped people', which might be a bit messier). Randall suggests trying to get someone to buy into this idea, only to later realize that they have just bought the idea of tap water.
The comic also seems to jab at the unnecessary buying of bottled water, when most places in the western world have perfectly drinkable water in the pipes. However, not all recipients like mains water ( hardness , softness and various additional water-treatment chemicals can affect taste and the action of water with detergents, and in some cities it might even be unwise to drink tap water, at least for tourists), which is why there is still a healthy business for bottled water (of many brands with subtleties to taste) even in households and establishments with piped-water available. The other explanation, for cynics only, is that the marketing budget for bottled water creates the industry. See The Gruen Transfer episode on Bottled Water (season 2 episode 3 (#13)) where the marketing is considered.
In the title text Randall tells that when he was a kid he was asking his parents why there were not an additional pipe for toothpaste next to the water pipe.  Amazon thinking the "same way" is a sarcastic jab implying Amazon saw toothpaste tubes and wondered why water wasn't delivered the same way (in small bottles).  Both are implied to be examples of childish ideas, but Amazon is actually following through on theirs. The idea of a toothpaste pipe is revisited in 1649: Pipelines .
[Caption above the frame:] Now that Amazon is advertising one-hour delivery of bottled water,
[A larger building complex is show on the left. An arrow goes to a blue bottle in a brown package in the middle of the frame. Another arrow continues over to Cueball on the right. The same building and Cueball is drawn below four more times. More and more bottles in packages are added. First two with a third arrow in between. Then six packages with water, so close that there are only smaller arrows at both ends. Then there is one long package from building to Cueball with 20 bottles close together, with small arrows at both ends of this package. Then finally this turns into a stream of water flowing through a package "pipe", shown with one arrow in the middle of the blue water. Again with small arrows at both ends of the pipe.]
[Caption below the frame:] I vote we start calling municipal plumbing "on-demand hyperloop-style water delivery" and see if we can sell anyone on the idea.
