Ok, so 100 people can all drive to the store, or one delivery truck can drive to everyone's house. (Ignoring the packaging waste for a second,) I suspect delivery of single items cuts back significantly on trips to the store.
It results in fewer miles driven and more being done per mile driven. Each parking space gets more done per parking space. There's less retail worker overhead and the people that do work are paid better and have a higher quality of life.
Others have mentioned the parking lot sizes. If we wanted the best of both worlds, we could have online shopping at Costco with curbside delivery. There has to be a warehouse somewhere which means there are trucks/trains/planes moving goods around regardless. Even Amazon builds warehouses closer to where things need to end up eventually to optimize costs. You are comparing apples to oranges.
Finally, Costco delivers if you really don't want to leave your house. Now we are back to the same model but with far more flexibility.
Do you want an 18-wheeler truck to do your curb-side deliveries? Or a personal train?
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.
Even environment aside, from a purely self-interested perspective, I would much prefer it to dealing with the recycling Amazon deliveries entail.
Either we can view single-packaged items as a gap in the goods procurement process, or we remove the means (Amazon) and view it as a forcing function to not have single-packaged items since a certain % of 100 people will start batching before they drive to the store.
Amazon is also specifically incentivized to be efficient at scale, it impacts their bottom line to the point where they care about the shape of their vehicles. Individuals don't operate on the same scale so these sort of micro-optimizations don't happen.
I honestly can imagine that Costco is overall more efficient than Amazon, especially for people who do shop at Costco. If there's no Costco closeby, its more likely that the individual humans will shop elsewhere or somewhere more convenient.
there are people who regularly go out of their way to drive to their favorite store for like 1-2 special items, people bring their dogs along on trips for companionship and leave them sitting in an air conditioned idling car while they shop
individuals are irrationally inefficient in dozens of ways that large businesses root out, for better or worse
A clever person solves a problem; a wise person avoids it.
I think it holds a lot of truth in engineering.
Could you just place 3 different orders to 3 different vendors? Sure.
Could you just drive to the grocery for 2 bananas and then to Costco for the big discounted paper wipes? Sure.
But likely you will not. Which is why Amazon pulls a Trillion in revenue.
I’m not so sure their retail piece is the part that’s making them big money.
Retail has famously razor thin margins.
But their cash flow came in handy when AWS needed 300B in cash for gpus. Nobody could lend them that amount.
My point wasn’t that they don’t do a lot of volume; it’s that their retail business is not what’s driving their profit, and I don’t believe it’s growing.
I wouldn’t be surprised (though have not looked) if DoorDash (with DashMart), Uber Eats (which does more than just food), and Instacart have eaten significantly into Amazon’s revenue by solving the “get it to me” problem even faster.
If you do 2 deliveries per hour (like Uber Eats / door dash), you pay essentially $5/order (assuming a super low us wage of $10/hour).
So no in the US, Amazon is not threatened by such delivery services.
Now if you go to China, the equation flips. Which is why Amazon failed completely.
Okay you like Tailwind because you seem to think “p-2” is better than specifying “padding: 2rem;” because when it comes time to tinker with things you don’t want to understand CSS, you want to play with Tailwind.
I used to work right across the st from one and would spend most of my shift looking out at their parking lot and you could see it get more packed throughout the day, thin out a little bit in the early afternoon and then slowly drain towards closing.
It's always least crowded right at open and then an hour (? or maybe two?) later they open for the "regular" people and once that's the case, it fills quickly.
Saying that everyone eating there is indulging in overconsumption is a ridiculous overgeneralization. Not to mention people that are planning parties, bbqs, get togethers etc. Just because you can't think of any reason for people to need large portion sizes besides overconsumption does not mean others are so limited in their imagination.
Similarities:
* Like you said, both have fewer choices than a conventional grocery store: if you want ketchup or peanut butter, there's only going to be one brand and one size. * Both of them don't have scales at the registers: unlike at a conventional grocery store, nothing is sold by weight (which I'm sure provides another small efficiency gain). * Both of them are cheaper than your typical grocery store.
Differences:
* I feel like Trader Joe's leans on store brand / white-labeling items more than Costco -- yes Kirkland Signature is a thing but Trader Joe's takes it further. * (Obviously) the shopping experience is pretty different both in terms of the in-store experience and the quantities things are sold in. * Costco requires a membership, Trader Joe's doesn't.
IMO Costco’s food hits the sweet spot between high end grocery store quality and walmart level price.
And the reason I chose Walmart at that time is because they offered good products, mostly first-party inventory (despite the marketplace format) but moreover, they offered a quick add-on option at checkout to hire a haul-away service to come to my door and haul away the junked, old mattress.
I own no vehicle; I live on the second floor no elevator, and the haul-away service was a godsend and a bargain price.
Amazon and other delivery companies (e.g. Weee) came to the rescue. For a while I lived close enough to a Costco for a 20 minute bike, so I'd load up my gym bag full of food - even then Costco is not ideal because there's only so much you can carry (one thing of meat, one thing of eggs, some veggies).
For those that think Costco are the uber-shopping experience are missing that they both provide very opposite consumer experiences. (Yes Costco has shipping, and same day shipping, but it hits different from Amazon).
This is also opposite to corner store grocery systems where you can pop in at any moment to get fresh fruit, a wider choice, smaller quantities at more flexible hours etc.
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tldr - what I think I'm saying is that Costco is the perfect "suburban" purchasing experience - great if you tick the boxes that you have a big family (otherwise why do you need a 60 pack of toilet paper), a big house (where do you fit all that toilet paper), a car (to transport the toilet paper), etc.
anyone who don't tick those boxes can't really take advantage of any of that - so while Costco is amazing, it definitely shouldn't be the only way to shop.
I’m probably the only person who would notice that. Sort of how Steve Jobs explained that a good carpenter cares about the backside of the dresser as much as the front, even if no customer will ever notice.
When you order your X, a van doesn't drive from Amazon's warehouse to your home and then back with only your order. The van takes a van-full (hopefully) from the warehouse, and makes many stops at many homes, businesses, etc.
That seems more efficient, in terms of fuel, climate impact, etc., than each customer making a separate round trip. Is there data showing it either way?
https://news.umich.edu/carbon-emissions-and-grocery-shopping...
In-store pickup using a internal combustion engined vehicle produced more emissions than any other option studied.
... We report and compare the greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions for a 36-item grocery basket transported along 72 unique paths from a centralized warehouse to the customer, including impacts of micro-fulfillment centers, refrigeration, vehicle automation, and last-mile transportation. Our base case is in-store shopping with last-mile transportation using an internal combustion engine (ICE) SUV (6.0 kg CO2e). The results indicate that emissions reductions could be achieved by e-commerce with micro-fulfillment centers (16-54%), customer vehicle electrification (18-42%), or grocery delivery (22-65%) compared to the base case. In-store shopping with an ICE pick-up truck has the highest emissions of all paths investigated (6.9 kg CO2e) while delivery using a sidewalk automated robot has the least (1.0 kg CO2e). Shopping frequency is an important factor for households to consider, e.g. halving shopping frequency can reduce GHG emissions by 44%. Trip chaining also offers an opportunity to reduce emissions with approximately 50% savings compared to the base case. Opportunities for grocers and households to reduce grocery supply chain carbon footprints are identified and discussed.
It's interesting that consumers driving EVs reduce the cost on the same scale as deliveries (presumably in an ICE vehicle).
They omit apples-to-apples comparisons (at least from the press release and abstract)
* Consumer ICE vs. Delivery service ICE
* Consumer EV vs Delivery service EV
* Sidewalk delivery robot vs Bicycle or ebike
Like every other government service - highways, defense, etc. They’re profitable to the system, but not per se.
"In 2006, Congress passed the Postal Accountability and Enhancement Act (PAEA). This law forced the USPS to do something virtually no other government agency or private corporation has to do: prefund its retiree healthcare benefits 75 years into the future[0]. Essentially, they were legally required to fast-track billions of dollars into a fund to pay for the future retirement health benefits of current employees, and theoretically even future employees who hadn't been hired yet."
That said people don’t typically get in a car to buy one thing -though obviously sometimes they do. On average though their trips will be for multiple things. I still think even without using designated delivery days Amazon deliveries are more efficient than individuals going out to buy things independently.
I'd still love to see data.
The problem with environmental impact is really a consequence of subsidized energy costs, including the externalization of environmental cost. If the consumer and Amazon paid the actual cost of fuel, they would make valid economic and environmental choices and we wouldn't need to figure it out like this.
It makes me want to check my purchasing habits to see if I'm around that mark.
Seriously though, I was thinking on how I had to stop and get cat litter, milk, and cereal on my way home today when I read what you posted. While I get some consumables online; pet food, filters for my odd-sized vent, and until recently Hello Fresh; I mostly buy consumables in person.
That being said their refund and the way their employees is great though. I would prefer walmart if they treat their employee better and give better pay.