I have kids, and this isn't a problem for me - not really sure what the children angle is here?
I live in a small rural town in Scotland, yet Amazon and others can deliver stuff to my door the next day. In big cities, some companies even offer same-day delivery.
Honestly, I don't need my stuff any quicker than that.
I'm sure there are some genuinely useful niche uses for drones - for example, there was a recent HN post about a company in Africa doing drone delivery of medical supplies to remote and inaccessible locations.
But I don't think it's a good idea to fill our skies with noisy, flying lithium batteries, just so you can get a pizza in 16 minutes instead of 18.
Do you own a blender? How often do you use it? Do you not think that the economic and environmental cost of producing that blender is too large, considering how rarely you use it? It literally sits unused 99.99% of the time. Talk about inefficiency!
If a drone service could deliver a blender in 5 minutes when you had blending to do, and take it away again when you're done, the blender could get much better utilisation by being shared with the entire town, at a lower economic and environmental cost.
The same probably applies to nearly everything in your house.
While you might have a point for some items, I think there are diminishing returns for most; I obviously don't have numbers, but it would seem to be highly inefficient to fly a blender around with a drone. Your 5-minute figure is also pretty unrealistic.
I could see how drone delivery might work for high value items, but they could just as easily be delivered in an EV van/truck carrying hundreds of items instead of just one. One genuinely useful case might be quickly flying blood/organs to a hospital.
There is also the human cost to consider; the noise of a single drone is very irritating, I can't imagine the horror of having our skies filled with the things.
I know of course you were generalising, but in my particular case, I actually do use my mini-blender quite often (for making curry pastes) :)
