They're not efficient ways to deliver to consumers, but to delivery units like the local post office they're remarkably efficient (especially for rural areas). The biggest cost savings to be had would be to deliver from a local warehouse to the nearby DU, where you would pay the last mile carrier to do the heavy lifting. The issue you run into is that there's no appetite for increasing the load at these units, so no appetite for innovation until the infrastructure improves.
Which is still better than their chicken--look at the frequency of the presence of campylobacter in raw chicken in the UK. It's absurd to think that they're doing anything better.
When I was finishing up school (2013), our professor had worked out an agreement with the two congressional campaigns to allow our class to volunteer on both sides of the aisle. At that time, Republican data might as well have been non-existent when compared to the Democratic Votebuilder system.
In fact, I think the API ecosystem would be better served by trying to take inspiration from design teams to provide more standardized, compliant, and good-looking interfaces.