If you're an Amazon Prime member, you get orders pretty quickly. Some areas offer one-hour delivery, and some Amazon Fresh customers can get groceries even quicker. Now Amazon wants to shorten your wait time even more with Amazon Instant Pickup locations, which are localized spaces where you can pick up "daily essentials" within minutes of ordering them on Amazon's website.

In essence, Instant Pickup locations are convenience stores that don't have aisles—and barely have employees. Prime and Prime Student members can order items from Amazon Instant Pickup on their mobile devices, choosing from products including drinks, snacks, phone chargers, personal care items, and more. It wouldn't be an Amazon service without integration of Amazon's products, so members can also order Echo speakers, Fire TVs, and Fire and Kindle devices on Instant Pickup. Once the order is placed, employees at the nearest Instant Pickup location gather the items and place them in a self-service locker. Members can then go to that locker, open it with a personalized bar code, and retrieve their items within minutes of placing the order.

While customers presumably won't interact with the Amazon employees at pickup locations, they still require people to gather and place orders into lockers. According to a report from Reuters, Amazon considered fully automating Instant Pickup locations but didn't go through with it for the launch. Currently there are five Instant Pickup spots in cities across the US: Los Angeles; Atlanta; Berkeley, Calif.; Columbus, Ohio; and College Park, Md. Amazon hopes to open more Instant Pickup locations in the future.

Placing the first Instant Pickup locations near colleges and universities is smart because when students need things fast, their first stop will likely be the nearest convenience store. Students and other customers alike can be impulse buyers, and Instant Pickup lets you order and pick up so quickly that instant gratification is guaranteed. Amazon hasn't detailed pricing information for the products available through Instant Pickup, but they would need to be competitively priced against convenience and drug stores for customers to use the service over going to another brick-and-mortar shop.

Instant Pickup locations are also another clever way of Amazon using infrastructure it already has to serve another purpose. Amazon Lockers have been around for a while, letting customers order packages and send them to a Locker location that's near them (but not their home address) for convenient pickup. Amazon also announced Hub last month, which is essentially a locker unit made for apartment buildings and complexes, removing the hassle of package management for those residences. Lockers, manned or automated, are clearly important to Amazon's bigger picture—selling as many products as possible and getting those deliveries to customers as quickly as possible—and the company will use them in any capacity to meet that bottom line.