Amazon is delivering stuff by drones in some locations. Since this is supposed to be a bit in the future I figure you could do one of their delivery centers for the New England area. Should be somewhat rare, but could have all sorts of random items in it. I’d say the place could run off of backup power and have a kiosk out front where you could swipe a cash card to purchase stuff and have it delivered to map tile. If you order a lot it’ll show up in a crate. 
The idea of having a shipping facility like an amazon delivery center that one could explore sounds pretty cool, I wouldn’t mind going through a giant warehouse. We don’t exactly have any specific giant warehouses of random goods in the game quite yet. I don’t know about the having things shipped to you idea though, I like the idea of our money cards having more uses than just food and drink machines. But I find it hard to justify how such a delivery infrastructure even automated would still be in service, it’s not exactly like the delivery bots could defend themselves and in my opinion it just doesn’t mesh with the cataclysm atmosphere. But hey! That’s just my opinion.
All in all, definitely a +1 for a giant warehouse we can explore.
For a warehouse like area, how about storage units?
Amazon is using aerial drones. They wouldn’t need to defend themselves most of the time. I got the idea because I’ve been playing with a small quad copter the last couple days and I learned that Amazon has delivery with them.
Maybe not ‘Amazon’ - advertisement baaad But, a ‘Shipping Center’ or something like this could be interesting. This would also give you the opportunity to add in Drones and Copters which you could control, similar to the RC cars.
The ordering of items could be nice too, however, i Would make it a bit more difficult. Don’t forget that, even when automated, some people will be in there in order to watch over the drones and/or repair them, if need be, and those will be zombies, probably bashing up all the drones and machinery.
How about some sort of ‘quest’, where you actually have to find the Shipping Center first, get in there, get rid of all the Zombies (Technicians?), and then you might need to repair a few things, like a few drones, the backup generator, maybe some machinery…
And >then< you could try and order stuff via a console, or even with a PDA or something similar.
Another problem could be that all the machines/Generator will produce a bit of sound, it might lure zombies to the location so you’d either have to put defenses up or visit every now and then in order to make sure that they don’t overrun the place.
On Another note - this shouldn’t be an endless pool of items either, especially if you follow the setup I had in mind. They can’t get new stuff in their warehouse, so eventually the center would run dry ; the only exception would be if you personally refill the warehouse, just so you don’t have to drag all your stuff with you all the time…? Not sure if that’d be useful though if you have to wait several hours just to get a few pipes and scrap metal to build something
Hahahah, imagine suddenly your character hears some noise outside his shelter, goes to investigate and it’s a drone delivering some tickets to a baseball game, or a new harddrive…
Or there would be a chance for the drone to be on the “kill the looter”-mode?
One would assume, that in the kind of future CATA is based on life is cheap so maybe the drones could be equipped & programmed to response to attempted thefts with lethal rivtech force?
I don’t think you should have zombies inside. I think it should be a fully automated facility. Chuck full of merchandise… Valuable merchandise. That should be guarded… By automated guards. So it should be full of turrets and robots. Trying to access the warehouse should summon the police too. Number of drones should be limited and how much they can carry should be limited. So a center has only so much merchandise. Everytime a drone is sent out (by the player) there should be a % chance it won’t make the delivery (random crash between here and there) or it’ll make the delivery and not make it back. Either way add a wrecked drone and a package, either delivered or with the crashed drone aka damaged. Once the center is out of drones it’ll just give you an error. “Sorry, we cannot make your delivery at this time.” Maybe still allow pickup at site.
Purchase would have normally happened at the online, like Amazon. But lots of places like that would have put a kiosk out front for people to do purchasing there.