Well Fargo, Railway Express, even the Pony Express?...... Sears catalogue depended upon package delivery. Courier and express services have been around since Franklin founded the postal service.

When was the idea of any kind of "faster" package delivery ever considered to be ludicrous by anyone rationale and involved in commerce of almost any kind in the last 300 years?

These earlier versions were all dependent on the state of the technologies and infrastructures of there time, and the willingness to pay for faster services.

It's just so much faster today because we are able to use things like trucks, freeways, airports with freight aircraft, and have modern consolidated hub based sorting, using significant automation, and computerized tracking. This also allows it to be done so much more cheaply that we are all now able to use these kind of services.