Yeah, this argument falls flat on it's face.
Of course it's more complex than that.
When I worked from the office, centralized retail was very convenient and hardly added any driving.
If you work from home, the opposite is true.
The next revolution would be to standardize reusable packaging, that same daily delivery truck could bring that back. But only government could make that happen.
As someone that has lived in a walkable neighborhood with a lot of shopping let me tell you, it doesn't solve the problem.
Realistically you aren't going to reach more than 250k skus within a 20 minute walk of your home, and probably less. Even this is very heavily biased towards using retail space instead of space for anything else (homes, restaurants, parks, offices). You can only build up to add more space within a 20 minute walk so much, because traveling vertically takes time.
With only 250k skus, you're still ordering from outside of walking distance often for items. This is much less variety then the average consumer is use to. Now, you have a dense area with lots of people and lots of business all needing goods brought in and waste brought. It's doable, but requires the right planned infrastructure, and people start trying to optimize the last mile with ideas like package lockers.
EDIT: It's probably possible to reach 250k if you heavily lean on books/cds/dvds with only a few copies each. The actual daily items you'd expect a store to keep in stock (and thus need more inventory of each sku) end up just consuming a lot of space.
I live in a walkable quarter and I can reach three full supermarkets and 2 specialty supermarkets within 5 minutes. Doesn't matter whether I need to stock up on milk, vegetables or hand peeled shrimp in garlic sauce, I can get it.
Same with public schools (5 within a 2 mile radius), childcare (3), hospitals (2) and the park.
I don't get the argument either. Perhaps if you can't walk very far? If I put half an hour into walking I can easily buy all the essentials, such as a crash cymbal, oil of violets, steel nibs for my dip pen, a CD player, and a teapot.
I live in a metropolitan area and can walk to many stores within a 30 minute radius. (First supermarket is less than 5 minutes away).
But there is the added complication of weight. I can’t buy food for a week without driving there. Nor can I go and buy a TV by just walking to the hardware store.
30 minutes is on the longer side, but I think part of the point of walkable grocery runs is that you don't buy a week's worth of food like you do in a car. When I lived in Paris, I'd happily pop out to buy whatever I needed for a single meal. I had so many grocery stores within a 5-minute walk. Now that I'm in SF, I buy for the week (on my bike with panier bags) because the grocery stores I like are far from my home.
You definitely need infrastructure for that. Biking infrastructure in North American cities is.. not great. Definitely viable in some of the EU ones though.
For those to be effective, you do need good walking infrastructure.
I'd grab one of those except for the fact that I don't have a sidewalk connecting me to the grocery store. Totes end up working better for me as a result.
I think this is the point I was trying to make, but didn't make as clearly as I wanted.
Sure I could buy two or three different types of keyboards within walking distance, but none of them used my favorite mechanical switches. I was constantly facing choices where I would either need to travel by vehicle to a speciality store (train, bus or car), or I would order the item in. Judging by the flow of packages into my multi-residential building others were facing the same choice.
> none of them used my favorite mechanical switches
One of the major points(/claims?) of the OP article is that fewer choices is better, pointing to how Costco has just 4k SKUs (paragraphs 4, 5, 6, and some within later paragraphs). <shrug>
Sure, but 98% of what you buy is is either in the set of SKUs near you or substitutable for them. Near you only applies if you live among actual density of course.
Ironically I found my current keyboard (a quite nice Cherry) in a store near me. For specialty parts where it doesn't make sense to have to them sitting around in stores everywhere online shopping is still allowed, but I only need to order something every few weeks
Maybe I'm unusual, but I live in NYC, with a grocery store a two minute walk away, a Target and Trader Joe's a three minute walk away, and a Whole Foods a four minute walk away. (and various bodegas within minutes as well)
I went to that grocery store twice yesterday (picked up a bag of popcorn and a bottle of water to go to the movies, then later some potatoes and sour cream for dinner). I'm going in a few minutes to get eggs for lunch. So three times in the last 24 hours :-)
You're reminding me of the Yogi Berra quote (paraphrasing): "New York is so expensive no one lives there anymore."
You're not wrong, but millions (literally) of people do afford to live in NYC. I live in Harlem, which is more fun and more affordable than many areas.
I didn't mean nobody lives there. I meant if you plucked random people from all over the country and told them to relocate to NYC, odds are they would need a massive income increase to survive. And even then, it would be touch-and-go for most.
I'm from Harlem, and other parts of NYC. I moved out to pursue a career in an industry that is relatively non-existent in the NYC metro area. If I moved back now I could probably afford it on my current salary. But there are no jobs there for what I do. And if there was a bigger tech industry in NYC the costs would likely be even higher.
not who you were asking, but I walk to the store and carry my groceries home. Usually, twice a week or something. It's great. 10 minute walk each way, approximately, and never more than I can easily carry. I buy for two people. I'd go more often if I shopped for more. I do occasionally visit other stores - once or twice a month - because they have different selection of goods. To be fair, I'm still carrying the stuff because I walk or use a bus for most of my transportation needs.
It means my fridge can be smaller because I don't need to keep as much in there. It means it is really easy to shop whatever is on sale - I have two grocery stores near me. I rarely have vegetables that go bad because I can just buy the stuff I need. I can just stop on the way home from work if I'm working the day shift.
I did this for a while when I lived in the states, too, in a small town. I had a similar experience, but it was far less convenient and really only doable because I was in such a small town and lived alone.
Similar - realistically, unless you're stuck at home in a city, you can also plan to stop off somewhere on your way back from some event. If you mostly walk/public transport the overhead of this is very low.
If your events are regular, then you don't need to do the research each time either; and it becomes maybe an extra five or ten minutes.
I clearly said I buy for two and would go more often if I shopped for more. Many, many people with families do this.
I'm in Norway. Vehicles are expensive, children (regardless of age) are used to going outside and going to the stores. It is a common situation in larger cities. Heck, elementary children are often enough at the store unsupervised. I'm not sure why you think a 20-30 minute car ride plus at least an hour at the store is worse than a 20 minute round trip to the store with a 10-15 minute store break is bad, even if it is a few times a week. And even that can be avoided by just spending a little time on your way home from work.
I have a family of four and we manage just fine. The kids aren't toddlers any more (which only means that we can't put everything in the bottom layer of the stroller), but when they come to the age where they eat a week's shopping in a single sitting they will be old enough to take over a few shopping trips on their own.
yeah, I think people come at this from very different life expectations.
It is hard to take a toddler, a weeks groceries, and 50lb bag of dog food on a bike or bus.
Living without a car is easily possible, lots of parts of europe do it. They do it by living in small aparments, consuming less with more staples
Depends on how much we need. There are two car sharing stations next to the super markets when we need to stock up on long lasting basics, but I typically cover half a week (full family) in a trip. The nice thing is that when you absolutely need something (either for a recipe or when one of the kids has a sudden urgent urge) it's no big deal
I never assumed that you're fat. I have no idea what your BMI is. It was more a comment about Americans not being able to use their bodies to carry their own groceries. Of course being lacy and not able to do physical work can still mean that you're skinny. It wasn't a comment about you personally but about your culture.
I picked 250k sku because I think that is really close to maximum sku density, based on my experience designing planograms for certain retailers known for sku density. This maximum number of skews leans heavily towards spending space on retail instead of the other things you'd expect from a city like homes, restaurants, parks, service based business, offices, etc.
Part of this is overregulation, with zoning and planning departments enacting policies that make smaller retail spaces less attractive to builders and owners, leading to a low supply, and allowing egregious rent for well located small retail.
Yes, economies of scale likely mean that larger businesses can afford lower prices, but smaller businesses also get to avoid some costs (no large administrative corporate departments necessary for a one-location bodega), so the prices probably don't need to be as far apart as they are.
That’s not really responsive to my concerns about Robinson-Patman.
A world where it’s enforced uniformly and strictly might have some local benefits, but getting the government involved in regulating every wholesale transaction for “fairness” is a recipe for stagnation, corruption, or more likely both.
It is responsive to your question on why the government should have something to say about price negotiations between producers and retailers of frozen pizzas.
Government overreach X is good because in a sea of bad consequences, a few good things happen, too?
It’s much better for governments to be principled, and only interfere with mutually voluntary engagements by citizens when there’s an urgent harm to remedy.
All grocery stores close at 10 here (Ireland) but yes you are right. My local centra, 1km away is used for cheese, milk and beer runs. Everything else I get at the big lidl 15km away.
This is the ideal situation, and common in most west cost dense areas, but not true for every dense mixed use area. Specifically it's common in low-income high-density housing to not have sufficient super market coverage.
It’s an unrealistic number to justify the argument. Unless you consume for the sake of consuming, there’s no way anyone needs an offer that rich for routine usage.
Aldi and Lidl carry ~2-3k SKUs. A regular grocery will carry maybe 20k. In places where enough of these are built close to where people actually live you don’t ever need to touch the car for shopping. Small shopping centers (those that also have a something like a small book store) will add a few more thousands. A requirement of 250k SKUs in a 20min walking distance is going in the territory of once in a year or more purchases.
I think I drove to do groceries a handful of times in the last 10 years. I have multiple chains close enough that I can always walk, I can buy smaller batches and always have fresh food rather than a truckload to last a whole week but be stale by the end. Self checkouts and the abundance of stores means I have almost 0 wait time.
It can work but it has to be designed properly, and people need to change their habits a bit. Like not expecting hundreds of thousands of SKUs 10 min away at all times (which implies a huge store, so far from where people live).
I use to shop at Lidl. As you say, they carry a limited SKU assortment. But I have found it doesn't really matter. When I go to a grocery store that carries more variety, it feels exciting, but in the end it makes no difference. As long as I can get the essentials, I will manage. I don't need 20 types of hamburger dressing. I can make my own from first principles. I don't need 40 types of yoghurt. I buy can natural and eat with fresh fruit. And so on.
Lidl also has this interesting approach that they rotate some assortment. You can't find everything all the time. But once you realize that certain things periodically come back, you pick them up when they are in stock to make sure you have them at home. It is not as convenient, but if you make it a habit, it is a very minor disadvantage.
The rotation is because they stock the product for which they can negotiate the best discount.
But as you say the 20k SKUs premium stores stock aren’t a necessity. They drive up the costs for the store and the price for the buyer all so the buyer has the feeling they bought something different, when many brands are anyway the same product under different labels.
The premium store 3 minutes from my home stocks 30 types of mineral water. Aldi and Lidl stock maybe 3 of those 30. That’s what 99% of people buy anyway.
Until there's one less common thing you want. If you don't care much about flavour or have no taste in products then you can sub in any crap food or product.
I go to a particular supermarket because it has the tomatoes I like: they just can't be substituted. It also has an uncommon milk that is the only one I really like. The issue gets harder once you desire specific Deli foods.
How much of SKU selection is driven by individual consumer tastes? Some brand selection is driven by other causes.
That’s fine, you’ll just need to walk 10min extra to the specialty/ethnic/Deli store which stocks that. Supply is proportional to the demand so you can’t expect every niche item to be sold right next to you. How many types of milk can every store stock just so everyone can see their niche preference 10 min walk from anywhere?
250k SKUs means everything anyone would ever want. But the distribution of the demand for those SKUs is very lopsided. 20k are what everyone buys. Another 20k are probably things almost nobody buys. So how could you have both high and low demand items spread equally through a city without creating waste? If everything needs to be 10-20 min from you then somewhere a store is sitting empty with barely any customers or a shelf isn’t touched by anyone. The logistics for stocking and supplying products almost nobody buys costs everyone else.
One article I found[1] says that a Kroger store typically carries about 15k SKUs.
As another point of comparison: Costco themselves say[2] that they have about 4k SKUs, and state that most supermarkets have about 30k SKUs.
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Anecdotally, I can find just about everything I want, in terms of consumables, at Kroger.
Sometimes I walk over to the bodega instead. They don't have much for inventory outside of beer/smokes/soda, and their selection of actual food is both limited and expensive. But it's only a block away, so...
I don't think counting SKUs gives you a very useful metric. For example my local grocery store has a whole isle of different flours. Sounds great but its just a couple of brands each having their own interchangeable version of five or so standard flours with barely anything outside that range. That's not to stay that having choice for the "same" product is never useful but clearly not all additional SKUs provide the same amount of additional useful choice.
I suppose for the absolute majority of use cases, much less SKUs have to be present at store with immediate availibility for purchase, and the rest could be ordered online with delivery to the walkable store, resulting in efficient delivery and little effort required from customer, which isn't bad from health perspective.
I think it would still be a vast improvement if online shopping was relegated back to only a narrow set of specialty goods.
And this is ignoring the possibility of ordering less time sensitive specialty goods to a relevant store, where they can arrive on an existing shipment and share an errand with whatever else you might want from that store.
A lot of trendy ideas have come out of the internet, but I don't think any of them have achieved the religious status of "fuckcars" (aka walkable neighborhoods).
Its not that the ideas are bad or wholly wrong, but their is a sizeable contingent of followers who believe that walkable living is a silver bullet that fixes everything. Everything.
So to someone who happens to fall into contact with an evangelist, they sit and listen for a few minutes, and then come away like they just learned who the real God is. Any societal or personal illness you can think of, the Church of Fuckcars has a confident and surface level "makes sense" answer.
I second. I live right above a shopping mall and next to Dongmen, which is easily one of the largest shopping areas in the world, yet I still end up ordering most things online.
I doubt this is true. I walk to the store when I quickly need to get eggs or milk or something random I forgot. But I’ll drive to do the weekly grocery trip because I can’t carry food for a week (for a family) on my own without driving.
It’s almost like the AI answering “should I walk or drive to the nearest carwash”. Sure I can walk, I just can’t complete the grocery shopping lol.
It's not only about distance but being walkable, I gave a supermarket close to my house but you have cross a street with no crosswalks ( I think the closest would be like 20) instead of just the 5 minutes walk
This is complicated, though, by the question of how you get there: suburbs may have lower land prices but everyone buys more of it and needs the expense of having a private car (usually one per adult). In the region where I live, 20-35% of household income is spent on cars and that doesn’t include the expense of the land devoted to them or road maintenance.
If you live in a dense environment where you don’t need a car because walking and transit cover your normal life, recouping that much money often more than pays for the higher cost per square foot of building space.
> In the region where I live, 20-35% of household income is spent on cars and that doesn’t include the expense of the land devoted to them or road maintenance.
Statistically, a large amount of that is beyond what they need most of the time (whether size, quality, or range).
Totally, but it’s interesting how basically everyone I know who moved to the suburbs to save money pays roughly as much for housing (things like lawn care services add up) plus an order of magnitude more on cars.
> 30% of New Yorkers spend > 50% of their income on rent.
My point was that’s a bit less than the median suburbanite here spends on housing and cars combined. That doesn’t mean either option can’t be improved but that these comparisons should compare the whole lifestyle cost. Otherwise you’re making the same mistake Americans do saying they pay much less in taxes than Europeans without including the additional spending we make for healthcare, college, childcare, etc.
It doesn’t solve the packaging problem. I live in a walkable place, and the sheer amount of single use packaging is utterly insane. They’re different problems that both need addressed.
I could imagine Amazon incentivizing reusable containers on their own TBH. If I was living in a house and not an apartment, I could easily imagine putting the Amazon bins back out so the next time I get a delivery, they take those, and we are constantly cycling bins back and forth.
Even environment aside, from a purely self-interested perspective, I would much prefer it to dealing with the recycling Amazon deliveries entail.
Amazon did that with an earlier version of their grocery delivery service. I assume the cost and logistics of managing and cleaning the bins just wasn’t worth it because their grocery service delivers in paper bags now.
One problem with the bins for normal items is that rarely will they be packed to the brim. I imagine the overall item density would drop significantly if they started using standardized bins instead of appropriately sized boxes for the items.
Well, if there's one company on Earth that's both incentivized to find an algorithm to efficient pack stuff into their shipping bins and also well-financed enough to actually figure out a good linear or quadratic-time algorithm to do so, it's definitely Amazon.
And once they do so they'll have solved two big problems! :)
As someone who worked on logistics optimization algorithms for Amazon, I’ll just say that the one thing Amazon did best was have clueless upper management continuously make poor strategic decisions that continuously nullified all of their improvements from optimization.
What was the root cause of that? (Company consciously prioritized other things than those logistics optimizations? Individual incentives lead to management behavior that was against company's intent? Bad hiring and retention practices for upper management or whomever was informing them?)
They might have the ability to do so. The motivation? Well let me put it this way: I tried Amazon’s grocery delivery service, and stopped using it because everything—everything—kept arriving in its own individual bag regardless of whether it made any sense, so it was just a bunch of bags I had to carry upstairs. That bags also had no handles.
So they were optimizing for something, but it definitely wasn’t packaging efficiency.
Or the alternative that I occasionally encounter with non-grocery items - giant heavy item and small delicate item placed together in same box that is far too large for the both of them. A token piece of packing paper or lone plastic bladder tossed in, free to move about. The entire contents bouncing around.
Another amusing one was when they packed a somewhat delicate pantry food item in a paper envelope. It arrived thoroughly crushed, exactly as one would expect.
Yes. I recently tried ordering a standard cardboard tube box of oats from Amazon, and it arrived crushed and leaking in its presumably nonsterile paper envelope. They gave me a refund and told me to throw it out.
I think this would have been much less likely to happen without the envelope, since whoever packed the truck would intuitively pack the tube vertically.
Yeah but NP Hard bin packing doesn't usually include situations where a flat screen TV squished on top of pallets comes sliding out of the truck when you go to unload...
I used this service before it rolled out widely and these boxes were a mixed bag. On one hand they worked really well, they were essentially insulated hard totes with styrofoam lining and often had dry ice in them for anything that needed to be kept cold. On the other hand, I lived in an apartment, so storing 3-4 totes for a week or more was a real chore.
The funniest thing I remember though is that the totes weren't optimized for the size of some of the products available very well - if you put a frozen pizza in it, it sat diagonally, and without enough room to really put anything above or below it. You order four frozen pizzas, and you're allocating many cubic meters of apartment space for them until the next time you order.
They must have been using different crates for you (different region or perhaps era). For me they were standard plastic bins[1] with a separate “cold bag” inside for frozen stuff. No actual styrofoam I recall, although this was also over 10 years ago so I could be misremembering.
The style of plastic bin definitely looks the same. The ones we were getting looked something like this[0], same folding-flap top as in your link but form-fitted insulation inside:
Yeah. I’m not certain if the Amazon ones were actually the same as the ones I linked. But extremely similar at least.
It’s been a long time. Very plausible that we did get the ones with the styrofoam sometimes and I just don’t remember. I know we got the cooler bag sometime.
Our groceries from AH in NL come in foldable crates. The cooled items sit inside a plastic bag inside a foam box in the truck. The delivery person stacks the crates and foam boxes, brings them to your door, rings the bell. They hand the bag with cooled products to you and then you get the crates. You return the folded crates. This works just fine. They are also quite adept at filling the crates to a maximum. Unfortunately not always in the smartest way because they sometimes put the fragile things at the bottom and the heavy items like bottles of soda on top.
So this seems like a pretty solved problem. Of course you have to be home to receive the cooled products. There are some startups that sell cooled boxes that delivery persons can open with a code to put stuff in but they are not popular. Since Covid people tend to be at home more often than before.
That service was really weird. They had a special arrangement with the post office.
They’d slice cold cuts in New Jersey, and have USPS bring it to upstate NY and deliver before 8AM. There would literally be a mail van with two orders in it.
I have been told, by (if I'm remembering my source right) someone who has worked as a UPS driver for 30+ years, that Amazon does that on purpose. Because the variable they're optimizing for is not "are we wasting cardboard". Cardboard is a renewable resource, which also recycles really well, so a little wasted cardboard is not a big deal. What they're optimizing for is packing the truck. Your item arrived in a too-big box, because that box (and the air within it) was calculated to fit exactly into what would otherwise have been empty space in the truck if the box had been smaller. In other words, you know how sometimes inside a carboard box, you'll find the item you ordered plus another smaller (and empty) cardboard box used for filler space? That's exactly what they were doing, with your box as the filler space in the truck so that other boxes wouldn't slide around and damage their contents.
... I see someone else has posted this elsewhere in the comment thread. Eh, I might as well post this anyway, because it's confirmation from a different source.
That's a concept that might make sense, and it is something that I've heard from others over the years.
Except: The hypothetical perfectly-packed 53' trailer that leaves the originating warehouse is not the same trailer that delivers stuff to my doorstep. Things get sorted and re-sorted as they move along. It ultimately becomes random instead of optimized, and these random giant boxes take up a lot of space in local delivery vehicles.
Besides, the exceptions can be too exceptional to support any notion of it being deliberate.
It's difficult to describe the biggest box I've ever gotten from Amazon, except to say that it was too big to fit onto the seat of the recliner by the door where I usually put these things. I've received full-size, assembled, 1990s tower PCs in smaller boxes.
Inside of that exceptional box was just 3 ethernet cables, each 1 foot long, that cost me less than $1 each. That whole box could have been a brown paper envelope.
Yes, but by that time you're driving the truck around neighborhood streets, getting up to 25 mph at most before you stop at the next stop sign. Not nearly as much force being applied as making turns at 55 mph. During the long drive from the warehouse to that city (and the specific neighborhood), the boxes are packed in tightly.
Plus, I seem to recall that they also optimize by giving the driver a route to follow and planning the boxes to be packed in order, so that only one row is being emptied at a time. I know my UPS driver friend has told me UPS does this, and it's an obvious optimization so I'm sure Amazon does it too.
and webvan back in 2000 - both amazon's attempt and webvan are unfortunately gone - it's cheaper to throw away packaging away, and that's super unfortunate and sad.
I remember reading somewhere that the boxes are not sized to the items they contain, but to a combination of 'items they contain' and 'space we need the box to take up on the truck'; i.e. if you have five items of one unit size in a six-unit-wide truck they will slide around (and potentially get damaged, fall over, etc), but if you put one of those items in a two-unit-size box then the boxes will not slide around, meaning that while the box is inefficiently sized in isolation it is optimally sized in a logistical context.
I'm not sure how true this is, nor how reasonable it sounds since I don't know what the inside of an Amazon delivery truck looks like, but it sounds like the sort of thing that could be true in some circumstances.
I had heard the same thing from (if I'm remembering correctly about who told me) someone who has driven a UPS delivery van for 30+ years, so he has loads of experience with truck-packing. If he thinks it's true, I'm willing to believe him.
And if I'm wrong about my source, the other person who I could possibly have heard it from is my friend who works at Amazon. As a sysadmin managing a small part of AWS, not in delivery — but he would also be in a position to know.
Either way, I believe that's correct, that the oversized boxes are that size because they were being used as filler in the truck. The algorithm calculates the planned truck packing based on what items are going to be transported together (going to the same city therefore in the same truck), then picks out the box size that each item should go into. And most of them will be correctly sized, but in each row either zero or one (or possibly more in some cases) will be oversized.
"Amazon bins" ... or maybe just reusable bins that aren't specific to a company? See: shipping containers. A standard bin for home delivery could still have "Amazon" painted on it but the rest of the infrastructure wouldn't be Amazon specific.
That idea is intriguing but brings up a lot of questions. If I live out in the middle of nowhere, order something but take a long time to open it, when does the Amazon truck come back to take the packaging? If there's a million of us procrastinators, is it really that much better than normal centralized garbage collection? Milk bottle delivery and collection only worked because the product naturally had a time limit, and once home refrigeration took off, the practice went away because people didn't consume on the same schedule.
FWIW most Amazon packages I get nowadays are just heavy paper anyways.
You don’t need time limit, you just need to deal with the company frequently enough for this to work.
How I would imagine this work if there was will (I don’t think there is)… there are online grocery delivery services that do this already, it’s not that complicated.
You get your stuff delivered in a reusable bag. They charge you 1 dollar for the bag. Next time you have something delivered, you give the bags back and you’ll get your money back.
That also leads to my other (perhaps main) issue with this idea, which is that it requires some level of coordination or synchronicity with the delivery courier that's simply inconvenient for both of us. I've lived in apartments that 90% of couriers of any service cannot find their way around, because they weren't simple take-elevator-and-walk-to-unit designs, so I thanked the stars when we got lockers at the gate. Perhaps I could leave my packaging in a locker... but that just sounds like we re-invented trash collection? And actually, this is why I never used grocery services like Amazon Fresh or Instacart. I don't think grocery delivery is as solved as you think it is.
The implied time synchronicity also sounds like a nightmare. Taiwan does timed trash collection (you have to throw the bag into a garbage truck when it comes playing Fur Elise at 7pm) and there's a reason it hasn't spread.
I just think this is overcomplicating matters instead of just making the package generically disposable, which seems to be what's happening anyways.
Order whole foods from them. They will pack 6 things in 4 reusable insulated bags. The problem is there is no way to send those bags back to be reused.
This must vary by region. We get paper bags with a reflective liner. They’re re-usable if the super adhesive they use for the label stickers doesn’t require ripping the bag apart to open it, but they’re definitely intended to be disposable. Sometimes they just use regular paper bags and let our stuff get warm. It seems random whether they stuff the bags to the gills or have a single item per bag. This happens with both Fresh and Whole Foods.
It's still probably more efficient for you to just drive to the centralized place.
The amount of optimization and process improvements required to 'beat that' will be enormous, like infrastructural change enormous.
Your car is very useful an generalized and adaptable.
So are you.
Only you know what you really want, the nuances of comparison, seeing things real, returning them.
Economies of scale work extremely well for Costco.
'Home Delivery' is the operational argument that does not work very well.
If there were a hyper standard for mailboxes and automated delivery for tons of things - and - everyone bought into the same delivery standard, aka robots to the same warehouses, bringing multiple items to people on the same street - then that starts to work out, but we're a long ways away from that.
Home Delivery - in most situations - is effectively a first world luxury.
FYI - meal delivery depends on loopholes on migration, healthcare, work permits, working conditions that if they were all closed and up to standard - would make it just to costly in many situations.
Home delivery being a first world luxury is a joke. Delivery is a labor intensive low-skill activity. It's fifty times better in developing countries, at least in the cities, where the marginal cost of sending someone to your house is so much lower.
Unless you meant it's a luxury only in the first world, which I could get behind, especially food delivery.
Food Delivery is a First World Luxury - meaning that it's the only scenario in which the system functions reasonably (aka it's inherently expensive, a true economic luxury). Food Delivery is Cheap in places where the system is completely defunct, it's not a luxury it's a sign of failure.
Agreed with this statement. I've lived all over the world and have seen the wide differences.
I still remember living in a large suburb in India (not in the city; people had cars). We sat down for dinner and I asked if they had any ketchup. The host picked up the phone, spoke for 10 seconds, and 5 minutes later a boy knocked on the door with nothing but a single bottle in his hand. There wasn't even a grocery store close to the house that I could see.
Never living in any top-rated US cities have I seen anything close to that.
> Home Delivery - in most situations - is effectively a first world luxury.
The comments here always blow me away by how totally out of touch with the rest of the world many posters are. No, home delivery is not a luxury, it just works really poorly in your country.
India is going through a 15 minute or less delivery boom right now. It's gotten so popular that the government is asking companies to not promise 10 minutes because that would endanger drivers.
The standard is China is 30 minutes home delivery.
It has nothing to do with loopholes on anything. Just someone managed to convince you that what you've got is better than what exists out there already.
> It has nothing to do with loopholes on anything.
Not sure about India but delivery in China has everything to do with loopholes.
No health care and social security for most, and for the few who have the company artificially fake income for tax evasion.
Working conditions are the usual 12~14 hours a day with 2~4 days off a month.
The electric bike they are riding are dangerously over-limits and categorizes as motorcycles, which are actually banned in most big cities. Of the few that allow it, Shanghai for example, you need to pay ~$70k for registration alone.
In the US the situation is better but not free from problems, for example the first job for a lot of the illegal immigrants who can not speak English is package sorting with similar working schedule, but at least it pays good enough.
The comments here always blow me away by how totally out of touch with the rest of the world many posters are.
Yes, home delivery is a luxury, and it 'does not work' in India - it's only evidence of an utterly broken system.
It's a sign of radical inefficiency and economic failure that labour is being used for those kinds of things because it's extremely unproductive.
"It has nothing to do with loopholes on anything. "
--> it's entirely about 'loopholes' <---
Food delivery is not 'efficient' in India - it's the least efficient process imaginable - that can only work because 'loopholes' - marginal cost of labour is cheap aka no rights, no standards, high unemployment, low wages, externalizations and corruption, sketchy taxation, safety, social insurance, healthcare, emissions, food safety etc.
The only place in the world where 'Food Delivery Works' - is for rich people in First World countries.
That is the only scenario in which labour, rights, wages, taxation, non-corruption safety etc. are all met and the 'comparative value' (aka price) still works out.
That's it - the top 10% in the Denmark etc. can have their food delivered in a way that is 'economically efficient' (maybe >10% for some things) - aka those are the only people 'willing to pay a true fair market price when all of the externalizations are built into the model'.
We're making some progress with automation, probably China are leaders there but it's still not closed to automated and won't be because the marginal cost of labour is still low.
You are correct, and the problem is an embarrassing lack of understanding and imagination on the part of the people criticizing you. An entire car dedicated to delivering one meal at a time, directly to the recipient, should be exorbitantly expensive to cover labor and resource costs for the driver; the artificially low prices customers pay are borne by drivers, who see essentially zero return in the long run when their profits are netted against vehicle costs.
What actually works is delivery of multiple orders to a semi-central location for last-mile pick-up by the customers. In a sense, this is what restaurants and grocery stores are. But to retain the variety, readiness, etc. of delivery, obviously some new solution must come around.
How is a delivery service unproductive? Division of labor is one of the most fundamental principles in our economic system. You being able to do it yourself in your free time doesn't make it unproductive. You could also make your own clothes, that doesn't make the clothes industry an unproductive endeavor.
For some of the things I buy, I prefer just doing online, because it's often not easy to figure out where one particular thing is in the store. But when I have time, I do enjoy browsing in the store and discovering new things to buy that I never thought of before.
Home delivery in the U.S. is expensive because the labor cost is expensive, and because population is generally more spread out geographically. Cities in China and India have home delivery with much lower cost. But with the advance of robot technology, maybe not too far in future home delivery in U.S. could have lower cost too.
In the US, most people don't their shopping near the office. In Renton (commute into Seattle), it was commute to and from, then optionally local grocery stores to and from. WFH has dramatically reduced our driving which is a bonus over time saved.
You're assuming working from home automatically makes you far from delivery options. It all depends on your walkability and drivability score. I'm residential, but I have retail delivery options within a few miles. So, the nuance really depends on where things will go from and to.
Standardized packaging would be more robust, thus smaller as it wouldn't require filler material to protect the shipped item. Thus, volumetric cost would get lower and if ALL shipping had standardized packaging worldwide, it would probably make sense financially, too.
Amazon already delivers to the house next door to yours. The incremental cost of an extra stop is near zero.
The efficiency of home delivery vastly exceeds people going to the shops themselves, even if they are stopping at multiple shops.
Amazon already gives a discount if you're willing to wait for them to batch deliveries. Personally I would still have an order arriving every other day regardless of walkable/bikeable infrastructure. Same as most Americans.
Do most American's have an Amazon delivery every other day? It's not what it feels like where I live, but I might live in a part of the country unusually avoiding Amazon. While I see an Amazon truck every day, they visit 1-2 houses around me out of hundreds.
If feels like there are Amazon households that get a delivery every or every other day and non-Amazon households that order 1-5 times a year (if that) and batch their purchases from other retailers (physical or online). That's the genius of Amazon. Those that use them, use them a lot.
That's not the real question.... The real question is "On my block, what is the probability of any given house having at least one delivery on any given day"
I can say for certainty that Amazon delivers to my block every day. Adding 1 extra package is definitely more energy saving than me driving to Costco for the same thing.
> The real question is "On my block, what is the probability of any given house having at least one delivery on any given day"
In the city, I used to see multiple Amazon delivery trucks per day. On the rural road I now live on (dead end road with fewer than 30 households), USPS does most of the Amazon delivery, but this is somehow enough people that we see FedEx and/or UPS drive by pretty much every day in addition to USPS obviously driving by six days a week.
Given that they're also visiting the neighboring roads, it's definitely enough for an economy of scale.
"most americans" absolutely do not have "an order arriving every other day".
I order amazon on average once every 3 weeks. My mother (who has full time career and is under 60 years old) has never used amazon. Other members of my family also seem to rarely use amazon.
Also, having an order arriving every other day is incredibly wasteful.
When I worked from the office, centralized retail was very convenient and hardly added any driving. If you work from home, the opposite is true.
The next revolution would be to standardize reusable packaging, that same daily delivery truck could bring that back. But only government could make that happen.