Stop complaining about that flying car. You have Amazon: getting stuff gets more awesome every day.

• Author: Beato, Greg

In the 20th century, flying cars expressed the ultimate dream of personal autonomy, the power to propel yourself anywhere. In the 21st century, the stuff we want comes to us. For customers in a handful of cities who pay an annual $299 fee, Amazon promises same-day delivery of 500,000 items--everything from groceries to office equipment. "Place your order by 10 AM and have it by dinner," Amazon's website advises.

Soon you might only have to wait until lunch. In January 2014, Amazon patented a process it calls "anticipatory package shipping." Essentially, this involves predicting what items specific customers might buy, shipping those goods to nearby fulfillment centers, and possibly even loading them onto AmazonFresh delivery trucks before an actual order has been placed. This way, they'll be near at hand when the last remaining bottleneck in the company's increasingly efficient distribution chain--the slow-witted customer--finally realizes he has an urge to obtain a digital bath scale post-haste.

What Amazon is moving toward with such capabilities, Wired recently suggested, is a "21st-century version of the milkman and the mail carrier combined." And perhaps when it attains that status, it will attempt an even grander feat: Equaling the convenience of the 20th-century ice-cream truck.

In 1926, the citizens of Youngstown, Ohio, could get a Good Humor bar delivered to them without lifting a finger. In the tradition of 19thcentury peddlers, ice cream entrepreneur Harry Burt introduced a new technology of predatory retail, equipping a dozen Ford trucks with freezers and going out in search of customers wherever he could find them. A few decades later, the Good Humor fleet had grown to 2,000 trucks and was generating the bulk of the company's sales.

Rising gas prices and a shift toward the less dense suburbs ultimately undermined the power of this mobile distribution network. In the 1970s, Good Humor sold its vehicles to individual private operators. But conditions are shifting again. Our cities are packed with consumers who believe that atoms should arrive on their doorsteps nearly as fast as bits. Pick-up and delivery services proliferate in these places, and bulky and costly physical retail storefronts are beginning to feel like printing presses--obsolescing infrastructure that often adds little value.

Traditional retail won't disappear completely. In a bit of sales theater, Amazon itself is opening a bricks-and-mortar store in New York City...