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> Even if you think it is preferable at an individual level, there are good reasons to question the social value of the logistical complexity that it necessitat

by gwbas1c 3mo ago

> Even if you think it is preferable at an individual level, there are good reasons to question the social value of the logistical complexity that it necessitates. Home delivery of single-packaged items entails an entirely different cost structure than freight trucks driving to consumer-facing warehouses delivering entire pallets of goods to be driven home by customers themselves. 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.

lynndotpy 3mo ago
Those individual trips to the store are typically for more than single items, and are often incorporated into trips one would have taken anyways as part of the doing of errands.
- claw-el 3mo ago
  Technically, so is the home delivery. It is usually a delivery truck full of packages for nearby addresses.
  - alanbernstein 3mo ago
    Right, 100 trucks delivering 100 single items to 100 homes, or 100 consumers each making 1 trip to buy 100 things. It really depends on the details too much to simplify it so far.
    - claw-el 3mo ago
      It is more like 1 truck delivering 100 single items to 100 homes.
      - alanbernstein 3mo ago
        No, not if you're matching the volume of items between the two scenarios.
      - bluefirebrand 3mo ago
        Well, maybe more than one truck. One truck per delivery service
      - throwaway041207 3mo ago
        Multiple times a week.
        no-name-here 3mo ago
        For the aforementioned 100 homes, if the 100-items-in-1-truck are needed multiple times per week, then the 100-items-in-100-cars are likely also needed multiple times per week, so the extra CO2 etc would be even worse.
      - no-name-here 3mo ago
        With there typically being a free shipping minimum (or a relatively fixed shipping cost for daily goods), it seems like the benefits of the 1 truck model are likely even greater as customers are explicitly encouraged to group purchases together.
    - lynndotpy 3mo ago
      Just anecdotally, I think the typical Costco trip is alongside trips someone would have taken already. Go to work, take a 5 minute detour to stop by Costco for your prescriptions, gas, and groceries on the way back
      - sevenseacat 3mo ago
        As a non-American, all of these threads are utterly fascinating.
  - kelnos 3mo ago
    Right, so with Amazon you have one truck visiting 100 addresses every day for two weeks (because people are buying 2-3 items per order). With Costco you have 100 people each driving to Costco once, on a single day. From a cars-on-the-road and fuel expenditure perspective, the latter sounds better. If Amazon customers ordered like Costco shoppers, the Amazon model might very well be better. But they don't, so it isn't.
    - conductr 3mo ago
      In reality, you get both. People don’t shop at Costco OR Amazon. People primarily go to Costco for food (then stumble on everything else), Amazon has struggled over and over to get their grocery business to catch on. They’re just the best source of the everything else part. These are only comparable in an academic business model comparison, in reality, these are different retailers selling different things and consumers behave differently depending on context of what they’re buying. A lot of people want low cost on food, meanwhile, they’ll spend superficially on disposable plastic junk with very little practical value. I’m taking about the American consumer specifically when I say everyone.
  - conductr 3mo ago
    Amazon routinely is delivering things to my house 3+ times in a single day. They don’t do a great job of grouping their orders into deliveries. We’re usually to “blame”. We don’t do coordinated orders in our household. We have 3 people ordering individually and I know I sometimes place multiple orders per day. But, I’d expect that shouldn’t matter and they’d notice all these orders with the same address could be put on the same delivery truck. Instead, it seems they just process orders as first in first out. They have recently added a feature in the delivery options if I already have a pending delivery it will say “add to your Tuesday delivery” or similar, which I’m likely to choose. For a while they really wanted me to use an “Amazon day”, which would be like picking Tuesday as the day of the week my deliveries would come on. I specifically pay for Prime to have fast delivery so I don’t understand why they ever thought I’d go for that.
linker_in 3mo ago
> But to date it has still not been able to make the conversion away from being an online convenience store, which tells you something important about its model: Amazon is there to fill in the gaps of a dominant mode of goods procurement, not to replace it. 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.
rustystump 3mo ago
But most people go to Costco for bulk buys. amazon deliveries are almost daily sometimes multiple a day and STILL have the same giant trucks dropping off product at distribution centers.
Loudergood 3mo ago
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.
- newaccountman2 3mo ago
  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.
  - imoverclocked 3mo ago
    "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.
  - dpark 3mo ago
    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.
    - scrame 3mo ago
      I quite often get inappropriately sized boxes.
micromacrofoot 3mo ago
> I suspect delivery of single items cuts back significantly on trips 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.
- dragontamer 3mo ago
  Humans are specifically incentivized to be efficient at scale. They'll tend to shop at loctions on the way home from work, or otherwise cut down on travel times because traffic sucks. 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.
  - micromacrofoot 3mo ago
    this isn't even close to true and falls apart in a number of ways, the most popular vehicle in america right now (F-series truck) is woefully inefficient for just about everything 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
    - dragontamer 3mo ago
      Special items they can't get off Amazon, I presume? So they need to take that trip anyway. No one is driving an hour out of their way for groceries. And even the F150 truck example: if they are driving 30 miles to work, but 10 miles to Costco and 25 miles to home (Costco being 5 miles out of the way.), that F150 going 5 extra miles is more efficient than a Prius driving 25 miles from a Costco to their home. Integrating routes throughout the day that matches your driving habits is a basic adulting task that everyone does, and has reasonably high efficiency.
claw-el 3mo ago
Also, in the photo, it shows a huge car park. The stores, have to support large empty spaces for parking of those 100 people all driving to the store. I also wonder about the social value of utilizing the land that way.
- mock-possum 3mo ago
  Put solar panels over ‘em
  - analog31 3mo ago
    Put the entire building over 'em. And solar panels over the building. The Target near my house is built on top of its parking lot. I don't have to cross an entire parking lot, dodging traffic, when I go there by bike or on foot. And it's on a bus line. What's not to like?
    - SoftTalker 3mo ago
      In most places in the US, land is cheap enough that paved surface parking is cheaper than building the store above a parking garage. In central urban areas, it's not, so they build up.
    - rsanek 3mo ago
      The exepense is what's not to like. Far cheaper to build a single-story warehouse + outside parking lot than a second story above a parking garage.
      - antiframe 3mo ago
        Only because stores that have large parking lots are in cheap land areas that are hard to reach by bus, bike, or anything except a car really. Where one can comfortably walk to a store, giant parking lots are awful.
        analog31 3mo ago
donatj 3mo ago
It's a little my complicated than that though, I'm very rarely driving to the store for a single item.
- ghaff 3mo ago
  Not groceries, which I'm typically buying locally anyway. But I'll frequently drive to a store for some item I need.
imoverclocked 3mo ago
I go to Costco when I have something else to do in the area; It's almost never a "trip to Costco" for me. 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.
- troupo 3mo ago
  > There has to be a warehouse somewhere which means there are trucks/trains/planes moving goods around regardless. Do you want an 18-wheeler truck to do your curb-side deliveries? Or a personal train?
  - imoverclocked 3mo ago
    What?
    - snypher 3mo ago
      I think to clarify your point, curbside pickup is the curb of the store/warehouse, not the curb of your house, correct? I think the netizen above thought it was your house's curbside?
      - mpyne 3mo ago
        That's correct, with curbside pickup you drive to the store, pop open your trunk, and in principle someone from the store's staff is ready and waiting to verify your identity and then load your pre-staged shopping right into your trunk, and you drive off. So you still have to go to the store but it can be an in-and-out if everything works.
        3mo ago
BorisMelnik 3mo ago
great for specialized items you want to pay premium for, awful for paper towels
zeroonetwothree 3mo ago
When the Amazon truck drives down my street it’s always stopping at 5 houses or so. So the marginal cost of my package is practically zero.
- oezi 3mo ago
  If you have ever watched a deliver truck on their tracking app to crawl its way to you from stop to stop you realize the most optimistic timing is maybe 1 minute per package. Assuming the truck, driver, gas could be operated for 60 USD/hr the marginal cost seems more like 1 USD per package, but likely more.
  - antisthenes 3mo ago
    No wonder Amazon decided to basically create their own logistic chain. Fedex/UPS cost for a single package is roughly ~$13.95 (this was ~5 years ago when I was working in ecommerce) and even if Amazon was getting a huge discount from them for the volume they do, it was still probably nowhere near $1/package.
    - rootusrootus 3mo ago
      That 13.95 price includes airplane rides too, it isn't just the last mile delivery.
      - antisthenes 3mo ago
        999/1000 times if you track the package, it was going ground on a freighter. That price is generally way too low to include air mail.
- roysting 3mo ago
  That is not a logical way of locking at it. You can’t simply “practically zero” the not-zero marginal cost, on top of acting like there’s not a fixed cost that is literally the reason you rationalize that there is “practically zero” marginal cost. It’s equivalent to “I should live in your house for free because the marginal cost is practically zero”
groundzeros2015 3mo ago
Prices tell this activity is very efficient and not burdensome on society.
dexterdog 3mo ago
It might, but I go to Costco every 3-4 weeks. If I depended on Amazon for everything I'd be getting multiple deliveries per day because there is no disincentive to doing that.
IncreasePosts 3mo ago
Back in the day people weren't driving to Walmart or whatever all the time to pick up a thing they wanted/needed, they would do that if they needed it right away, but if they didn't they would just wait until they were already in the store for a weekly trip, or pop in if they happened to be driving by on some other errand they needed to run
arikrahman 3mo ago
I never thought about it but doorstep delivery actually saves on emissions in a more optimized route. Interesting takeaway.
- alistairSH 3mo ago
  One issue is Amazon doesn’t appear to optimize for “fewest trucks trips to the block” - we’ll see 4-5 Amazon trucks/couriers on our cul de sac every day (plus USPS, UPS, FedEx, DHL). That’s for 10 homes. If Amazon was able to do one truck to the block, that would big a big win for fewer trips/less emissions. Probably.
  - cortesoft 3mo ago
    You aren't seeing the entire picture, though, so it makes it hard to understand the efficiency calculation. How full are those Amazon trucks, and how many deliveries are they each making on their route? If those Amazon trucks are all full, and are making deliveries constantly along their routes, than more trucks doesn't mean less efficiency. They aren't optimizing for "fewest truck trips to the block", they are optimizing for total cost. As long as we price in all the externalities properly (which we don't, but we could and should), then Amazon is going to be strongly incentivized to create the most efficient delivery schedule. That may include many trucks running to the same location, or it may not. You can't tell which will be most resource efficient just by observing.
    - antiframe 3mo ago
      > If those Amazon trucks are all full, and are making deliveries constantly along their routes, than more trucks doesn't mean less efficiency. Right but a truck could be full of not 100 packages for 100 houses, but 100 packages for 70 houses. Both are full, but one will require fewer miles driven, hence be more (fuel/environmental impact) efficient (not necessarily time efficient).
      - Spooky23 3mo ago
        They are optimizing for time and cost, not message board clout :) They presort regionally and the trucks at the delivery stations are loaded with assigned containers/pouches of packages. It doesn’t make sense to hold a truck for a pouch and doesn’t really save anything to have ground covered twice. They do other stuff too. They schlep heavy stuff on UPS, and hazardous or liquids usually go USPS.
cm2012 3mo ago
For the average person an Amazon package has amazingly lower emissions than driving to the store.
mattmaroon 3mo ago
Came to say this, it would be hard to handicap this one. Shopping tends to be clustered, so if I’m methodical, I can go fill a car load with a lot of stuff and that might be more economical and environmentally friendly than the vans. But if I’m not, I could certainly see how it would be worse. I wouldn’t feel comfortable saying it averages out to being better or worse.
_heimdall 3mo ago
I'd be curious further upstream as well. How would it compare from whatever shared point of entry the two approaches would have, say from coming off a boat at a port to the end user rather than just comparing the last mile.
delichon 3mo ago
For small items, add drones and the last miles savings get big. Weight of a typical car: 4,000 lbs. Weight of a typical delivery drone: 80 lbs. Typical drone payload: 5 lbs. 5 mile drone delivery: ~2 kWh 5 mile car delivery: ~100 kWh So the breakeven is ~50 such items in one order.
- mciancia 3mo ago
  Lol, where did you get those numbers from? xD Tesla uses something like 15kWh per 100km, so 5 mile drive is something like 1.1kWh
  - delichon 3mo ago
    Yeah I botched that. It's around 1.5kw/mile for an ICE car.
    - rootusrootus 3mo ago
      And ~0.25 kWh/mi for an EV
- lesostep 3mo ago
  math checks out, assuming typical car is flying
petra 3mo ago
Judging Amazon's social value by delivery efficiency is just wrong. Amazon's biggest benefit is that anything can be sold there. So now more problems in my life could have a solutions I can buy. As for the delivery? There are more efficient ways to send deliveries. People can pickup deliveries at work or the gas station on their way home. People don't care. How is that Amazon's fault?
- gdiamos 3mo ago
  I wonder if Amazon eventually gets cut out by 3D printing/replicators for imitable objects.
- SideQuark 3mo ago
  So you replace a loop that delivers last mile goods to a lot of cars going decently out of their way to the limited places just to pick one item? Surely it’s less miles driven when Amazon does a loop hitting several people right near me than each of us driving farther in total to get our goods.
  - petra 3mo ago
    I agree. It depends on how well the pickup points are located. Often Amazon can win. They also use EV trucks, and create jobs, so there are advantages.
1vuio0pswjnm7 3mo ago
Perhaps this is just slightly oversimplified Amazon goes to great lengths to make purchasing exceedingly easy and fast. And with Prime, customers can buy a single, low-priced item with no shipping costs, cf. the Costco requirement to buy in bulk quantities. As one would expect, this convenience and facilitation leads to more purchases. It also results in more packaging, more waste, more emissions, etc. This was detailed in a 2024 Netflix documentary that interviewed a former Amazon VP who was fired for her environmental activism https://www.netflix.com/title/81554996 https://www.netflix.com/title/81554996 She disclosed, brace yourself, that Amazon encourages people to buy stuff they do not need https://www.mirror.co.uk/tv/tv-news/former-amazon-employee-buying-hack-34081322 https://www.mirror.co.uk/tv/tv-news/former-amazon-employee-b... https://www.cnbc.com/2021/09/29/amazon-settles-with-employees-who-said-they-were-fired-over-activism.html https://www.cnbc.com/2021/09/29/amazon-settles-with-employee... Unlike Costco, Amazon does not disclose data on its environmental impact, e.g., carbon emissions. It's possible Amazon's impact is less than Costco's, Costco's data shows its impact is relatively severe, but if that were true, then why not share the data Is driving to a warehouse, retrieving items in bulk, paying for them and driving the items home, i.e., offline shopping, as easy as placing an order on Amazon Of course some HN reply will say "yes", implying that the former Amazon VP's story is false Let the reader decide who to beileve
- bombcar 3mo ago
  If you don’t think Costco encourages people to buy things they don’t need you’ve never shopped at Costco. Anyway, my 55 gallon drum of mayonnaise is starting to go bad, got to make a run.
- phil21 3mo ago
  You know how Costco constantly moves some of the usual “staples” they have around the store randomly? And how Costco can never be relied on having the same item outside of those core products every time you go to the store? Better buy it now since next month they may no longer have it and you need to wait 6mo before you see it again - if ever. That’s on purpose to induce you to wander the store more and “discover” items for impulse purchasing. Costco absolutely optimizes as much as it can to induce impulse buys. Pretending they don’t is a weird take. Amazon might make it more frictionless, but every retailer out there is doing this sort of thing. I kind of prefer amazons way of doing it since it doesn’t introduce friction to my buying experience and waste my time. Costco is also world renowned as a meme for peak American style consumerism. I say this as an executive member who also buys a lot off Amazon. They are just yin and yang of the retailer experience. I don’t really see one as more evil or better than the other - just totally opposite business models.
UltraSane 3mo ago
Costco's trademark is pretty large minimum size containers which reduces transportation costs.
zerobees 3mo ago
Cuts both ways. When I go to the grocery store, I buy 30-40 items at once. When I buy them Amazon with Prime delivery, I usually order stuff piecemeal, in the heat of the moment. Sometimes, Amazon will consolidate two orders in a single package. Sometimes, they will ship a single order in three boxes that arrive in different trucks.
- s0rce 3mo ago
  But there are 100+ items for other people on the route on each delivery truck each day. So maybe better than individuals driving to the store. If you don't drive to the store that will for sure be better but thats abnormal in america.
jasondigitized 3mo ago
How many items does the average consumer buy when they go to the store? It's not one.
thephyber 3mo ago
It’s much more complicated than that. In a society where everybody is already driving to school, work, food, shopping medical appointments, gas stations, kids sports, etc this is just a marginal additional trip for the consumer. Having redundant logistics companies (USPS, FedEx, UPS, DHL, Amazon, WalMart, Uber, etc) all making deliveries optimizing for something other than _minimum distance traveled_ means they aren’t optimizing for the same thing the consumer would. Also, there is the game theory aspect. When a consumer mentally thinks they can just make a $5 purchase on Amazon and get it delivered the next day “for free”, they are less likely to take care to shop in bulk / batch their purchases. Nobody goes to CostCo for a $5 trip (except for the weirdos who go there just for the hot dog / pizza lunch). I personally don’t like the hassle of CostCo for less than a $200 shopping trip.
- deleted 3mo ago
  [deleted]
kbenson 3mo ago
> Ok, so 100 people can all drive to the store, or one delivery truck can drive to everyone's house. Whether you see that statement and read it as "obviously the delivery truck is better" or "obviously, going myself is better" is going to be primarily based on how far away from Costco you live, and how much you buy when you go. I live a bit more than a mile away from Costco. I often buy 25-60 items, for each of the about weekly trips. There's enough large items that a normal delivery truck that could safely navigate and stop often in residential areas would have no change of fitting 100 people's purchases into it in a way to be easily offloaded (just the toilet paper and paper toweling would take up significant space). It's much less wasteful on almost all metrics for me to go to Costco. That's before we get into the fact that most of what I'm buying is produce and other food stuffs I wouldn't want shipped for worry they would spend longer than I wanted out of refrigeration. If I lived an hour away that calculation turns out entirely differently, at least as long as there's enough people close by with purchases to gain efficiencies of travel.
randycupertino 3mo ago
I think online ordering is more wasteful because people order the wrong thing and don't know what sizes fit so they often buy multiple sizes and return or toss the ones that don't fit. This article where they buy a pallet crate of returned amazon clothing is pretty crazy- it was all polyester crap! https://www.nytimes.com/wirecutter/reviews/mystery-amazon-pallet-unboxing/ https://www.nytimes.com/wirecutter/reviews/mystery-amazon-pa... I saw commentary from a garment designer that there is enough clothing currently unused on earth to clothe the entire next six generations even if we completely stopped all production now. At least in person people can try the stuff on and ensure it fits.
smashah 3mo ago
Carbon offset credits bought by Bezos' Yacht holdco.
kelnos 3mo ago
Amazon's logistics and approach discourage bundling, while Costco's in-store approach incentivizes it. So it's more like 100 people drive to Costco, and they each buy 20 items and drive home. Or one Amazon delivery truck makes 1000 separate deliveries over the span of a week, because those 100 people made 10 different orders each, only ordering 2 items at a time. (I've even run into the situation where two separate Amazon orders made on the same day [because I forgot something in the first order] will arrive two days later, on two separate trucks, at two different times of the day.) This part bears repeating in a different way: if I go to Costco and get 20 items, I drive there and back once, on one day. If I order like people typically do on Amazon for those same items, I have a truck/van visiting my address 5-10 times on a bunch of days over the span of two weeks.
didntknowyou 3mo ago
costco buyers typically buy in bulk and fill a pantry in one go. i doubt one truck can fill 100 pantry. maybe a few products each
- phil21 3mo ago
  Costco can only fill maybe half my pantry because they don’t carry everything I like to eat or use regularly. They do a form of cherry picking the easy high volume stuff, and let other retailers deal with the harder more expensive low volume products. Certainly useful to optimize their bit of the supply chain, but they only can really account for maybe a quarter of the food items we eat, which accounts for a third or maybe half of total product volume any given month. The rest needs to come from additional store runs or Amazon.
messh 3mo ago
The argument is that people driving will each buy a lot though, not a single toothbrush. So 100 people driving will deliver as many trucks and would drive much less overall
hibikir 3mo ago
It depends on the lived environment. In my US suburban house, a 20 minute drive from the warehouse/Costco, absolutely. In the Spanish town I am in, where I can do 10 errands in an hour ln foot, as basically every street level space is a store, and streets are themselves narrow, Amazon's logistics advantage loses to the Asian bazaar.
- alephnerd 3mo ago
  Costco's Spain operation is primarily for logistics and product test, not market penetration. Costco usually tests suppliers' packaging and logistics for products at their ExAmerica warehouses before deciding on exporting that vendor's product to NAM. This is how Costco became the largest alcohol exporter in Europe, why most frozen fish at Costco is soured from Iceland, and how Chinese, Japanese, and Korean goods and vendors are tested before selling at Costcos with large Asian American populations.
deleted 3mo ago
[deleted]
underlipton 3mo ago
It should be, "One delivery truck drives to several manned neighborhood drop-off points a couple of times a week, and 100 people walk to those points and walk home with their packages." Central distribution points that you have to drive to are as untenable long-term as everything being delivered individually. Frankly, this goes for food delivery, too.
elfly 3mo ago
I have to assume that unless the cost of buying at costco and driving back home is higher than buying it all at amazon and having it delivered. The total price + driving cost is a good proxy for how efficient the whole process is; amazon will somehow include in the price somewhere the delivery home, and both companies largely won't subsidize their whole business method. Social value is a little trickier; a lot of people benefit much from delivery, but in the end people probably don't buy everything from amazon or costco anyway.
alsobrsp 3mo ago
I live in a smallish city, we have a lot of stores I can shop at and a Costco within a 30 minute drive. For me, incremental marginal cost of the delivery is negligible compared to me driving to a couple stores, not finding what I need, and still ordering online anyway. In general, I go to stores to get something that I know they have, not because they have "pallets of goods"

by gwbas1c 3mo ago

lynndotpy 3mo ago

Those individual trips to the store are typically for more than single items, and are often incorporated into trips one would have taken anyways as part of the doing of errands.

claw-el 3mo ago
Technically, so is the home delivery. It is usually a delivery truck full of packages for nearby addresses.
- alanbernstein 3mo ago
  Right, 100 trucks delivering 100 single items to 100 homes, or 100 consumers each making 1 trip to buy 100 things. It really depends on the details too much to simplify it so far.
  - claw-el 3mo ago
    It is more like 1 truck delivering 100 single items to 100 homes.
    - alanbernstein 3mo ago
      No, not if you're matching the volume of items between the two scenarios.
    - bluefirebrand 3mo ago
      Well, maybe more than one truck. One truck per delivery service
    - throwaway041207 3mo ago
      Multiple times a week.
      - no-name-here 3mo ago
        For the aforementioned 100 homes, if the 100-items-in-1-truck are needed multiple times per week, then the 100-items-in-100-cars are likely also needed multiple times per week, so the extra CO2 etc would be even worse.
    - no-name-here 3mo ago
      With there typically being a free shipping minimum (or a relatively fixed shipping cost for daily goods), it seems like the benefits of the 1 truck model are likely even greater as customers are explicitly encouraged to group purchases together.
  - lynndotpy 3mo ago
    Just anecdotally, I think the typical Costco trip is alongside trips someone would have taken already. Go to work, take a 5 minute detour to stop by Costco for your prescriptions, gas, and groceries on the way back
    - sevenseacat 3mo ago
      As a non-American, all of these threads are utterly fascinating.
- kelnos 3mo ago
  Right, so with Amazon you have one truck visiting 100 addresses every day for two weeks (because people are buying 2-3 items per order). With Costco you have 100 people each driving to Costco once, on a single day. From a cars-on-the-road and fuel expenditure perspective, the latter sounds better. If Amazon customers ordered like Costco shoppers, the Amazon model might very well be better. But they don't, so it isn't.
  - conductr 3mo ago
    In reality, you get both. People don’t shop at Costco OR Amazon. People primarily go to Costco for food (then stumble on everything else), Amazon has struggled over and over to get their grocery business to catch on. They’re just the best source of the everything else part. These are only comparable in an academic business model comparison, in reality, these are different retailers selling different things and consumers behave differently depending on context of what they’re buying. A lot of people want low cost on food, meanwhile, they’ll spend superficially on disposable plastic junk with very little practical value. I’m taking about the American consumer specifically when I say everyone.
- conductr 3mo ago
  Amazon routinely is delivering things to my house 3+ times in a single day. They don’t do a great job of grouping their orders into deliveries. We’re usually to “blame”. We don’t do coordinated orders in our household. We have 3 people ordering individually and I know I sometimes place multiple orders per day. But, I’d expect that shouldn’t matter and they’d notice all these orders with the same address could be put on the same delivery truck. Instead, it seems they just process orders as first in first out. They have recently added a feature in the delivery options if I already have a pending delivery it will say “add to your Tuesday delivery” or similar, which I’m likely to choose. For a while they really wanted me to use an “Amazon day”, which would be like picking Tuesday as the day of the week my deliveries would come on. I specifically pay for Prime to have fast delivery so I don’t understand why they ever thought I’d go for that.

linker_in 3mo ago

> But to date it has still not been able to make the conversion away from being an online convenience store, which tells you something important about its model: Amazon is there to fill in the gaps of a dominant mode of goods procurement, not to replace it. 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.

rustystump 3mo ago

But most people go to Costco for bulk buys. amazon deliveries are almost daily sometimes multiple a day and STILL have the same giant trucks dropping off product at distribution centers.

Loudergood 3mo ago

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.

newaccountman2 3mo ago
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.
- imoverclocked 3mo ago
  "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.
- dpark 3mo ago
  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.
  - scrame 3mo ago
    I quite often get inappropriately sized boxes.

micromacrofoot 3mo ago

> I suspect delivery of single items cuts back significantly on trips 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.

dragontamer 3mo ago
Humans are specifically incentivized to be efficient at scale. They'll tend to shop at loctions on the way home from work, or otherwise cut down on travel times because traffic sucks. 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.
- micromacrofoot 3mo ago
  this isn't even close to true and falls apart in a number of ways, the most popular vehicle in america right now (F-series truck) is woefully inefficient for just about everything 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
  - dragontamer 3mo ago
    Special items they can't get off Amazon, I presume? So they need to take that trip anyway. No one is driving an hour out of their way for groceries. And even the F150 truck example: if they are driving 30 miles to work, but 10 miles to Costco and 25 miles to home (Costco being 5 miles out of the way.), that F150 going 5 extra miles is more efficient than a Prius driving 25 miles from a Costco to their home. Integrating routes throughout the day that matches your driving habits is a basic adulting task that everyone does, and has reasonably high efficiency.

claw-el 3mo ago

Also, in the photo, it shows a huge car park. The stores, have to support large empty spaces for parking of those 100 people all driving to the store. I also wonder about the social value of utilizing the land that way.

mock-possum 3mo ago
Put solar panels over ‘em
- analog31 3mo ago
  Put the entire building over 'em. And solar panels over the building. The Target near my house is built on top of its parking lot. I don't have to cross an entire parking lot, dodging traffic, when I go there by bike or on foot. And it's on a bus line. What's not to like?
  - SoftTalker 3mo ago
    In most places in the US, land is cheap enough that paved surface parking is cheaper than building the store above a parking garage. In central urban areas, it's not, so they build up.
  - rsanek 3mo ago
    The exepense is what's not to like. Far cheaper to build a single-story warehouse + outside parking lot than a second story above a parking garage.
    - antiframe 3mo ago
      Only because stores that have large parking lots are in cheap land areas that are hard to reach by bus, bike, or anything except a car really. Where one can comfortably walk to a store, giant parking lots are awful.
      - analog31 3mo ago

donatj 3mo ago

It's a little my complicated than that though, I'm very rarely driving to the store for a single item.

ghaff 3mo ago
Not groceries, which I'm typically buying locally anyway. But I'll frequently drive to a store for some item I need.

imoverclocked 3mo ago

I go to Costco when I have something else to do in the area; It's almost never a "trip to Costco" for me. 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.

troupo 3mo ago
> There has to be a warehouse somewhere which means there are trucks/trains/planes moving goods around regardless. Do you want an 18-wheeler truck to do your curb-side deliveries? Or a personal train?
- imoverclocked 3mo ago
  What?
  - snypher 3mo ago
    I think to clarify your point, curbside pickup is the curb of the store/warehouse, not the curb of your house, correct? I think the netizen above thought it was your house's curbside?
    - mpyne 3mo ago
      That's correct, with curbside pickup you drive to the store, pop open your trunk, and in principle someone from the store's staff is ready and waiting to verify your identity and then load your pre-staged shopping right into your trunk, and you drive off. So you still have to go to the store but it can be an in-and-out if everything works.
      - 3mo ago

BorisMelnik 3mo ago

great for specialized items you want to pay premium for, awful for paper towels

zeroonetwothree 3mo ago

When the Amazon truck drives down my street it’s always stopping at 5 houses or so. So the marginal cost of my package is practically zero.

oezi 3mo ago
If you have ever watched a deliver truck on their tracking app to crawl its way to you from stop to stop you realize the most optimistic timing is maybe 1 minute per package. Assuming the truck, driver, gas could be operated for 60 USD/hr the marginal cost seems more like 1 USD per package, but likely more.
- antisthenes 3mo ago
  No wonder Amazon decided to basically create their own logistic chain. Fedex/UPS cost for a single package is roughly ~$13.95 (this was ~5 years ago when I was working in ecommerce) and even if Amazon was getting a huge discount from them for the volume they do, it was still probably nowhere near $1/package.
  - rootusrootus 3mo ago
    That 13.95 price includes airplane rides too, it isn't just the last mile delivery.
    - antisthenes 3mo ago
      999/1000 times if you track the package, it was going ground on a freighter. That price is generally way too low to include air mail.
roysting 3mo ago
That is not a logical way of locking at it. You can’t simply “practically zero” the not-zero marginal cost, on top of acting like there’s not a fixed cost that is literally the reason you rationalize that there is “practically zero” marginal cost. It’s equivalent to “I should live in your house for free because the marginal cost is practically zero”

groundzeros2015 3mo ago

Prices tell this activity is very efficient and not burdensome on society.

dexterdog 3mo ago

It might, but I go to Costco every 3-4 weeks. If I depended on Amazon for everything I'd be getting multiple deliveries per day because there is no disincentive to doing that.

IncreasePosts 3mo ago

Back in the day people weren't driving to Walmart or whatever all the time to pick up a thing they wanted/needed, they would do that if they needed it right away, but if they didn't they would just wait until they were already in the store for a weekly trip, or pop in if they happened to be driving by on some other errand they needed to run

arikrahman 3mo ago

I never thought about it but doorstep delivery actually saves on emissions in a more optimized route. Interesting takeaway.

alistairSH 3mo ago
One issue is Amazon doesn’t appear to optimize for “fewest trucks trips to the block” - we’ll see 4-5 Amazon trucks/couriers on our cul de sac every day (plus USPS, UPS, FedEx, DHL). That’s for 10 homes. If Amazon was able to do one truck to the block, that would big a big win for fewer trips/less emissions. Probably.
- cortesoft 3mo ago
  You aren't seeing the entire picture, though, so it makes it hard to understand the efficiency calculation. How full are those Amazon trucks, and how many deliveries are they each making on their route? If those Amazon trucks are all full, and are making deliveries constantly along their routes, than more trucks doesn't mean less efficiency. They aren't optimizing for "fewest truck trips to the block", they are optimizing for total cost. As long as we price in all the externalities properly (which we don't, but we could and should), then Amazon is going to be strongly incentivized to create the most efficient delivery schedule. That may include many trucks running to the same location, or it may not. You can't tell which will be most resource efficient just by observing.
  - antiframe 3mo ago
    > If those Amazon trucks are all full, and are making deliveries constantly along their routes, than more trucks doesn't mean less efficiency. Right but a truck could be full of not 100 packages for 100 houses, but 100 packages for 70 houses. Both are full, but one will require fewer miles driven, hence be more (fuel/environmental impact) efficient (not necessarily time efficient).
    - Spooky23 3mo ago
      They are optimizing for time and cost, not message board clout :) They presort regionally and the trucks at the delivery stations are loaded with assigned containers/pouches of packages. It doesn’t make sense to hold a truck for a pouch and doesn’t really save anything to have ground covered twice. They do other stuff too. They schlep heavy stuff on UPS, and hazardous or liquids usually go USPS.

cm2012 3mo ago

For the average person an Amazon package has amazingly lower emissions than driving to the store.

mattmaroon 3mo ago

Came to say this, it would be hard to handicap this one. Shopping tends to be clustered, so if I’m methodical, I can go fill a car load with a lot of stuff and that might be more economical and environmentally friendly than the vans. But if I’m not, I could certainly see how it would be worse. I wouldn’t feel comfortable saying it averages out to being better or worse.

_heimdall 3mo ago

I'd be curious further upstream as well. How would it compare from whatever shared point of entry the two approaches would have, say from coming off a boat at a port to the end user rather than just comparing the last mile.

delichon 3mo ago

For small items, add drones and the last miles savings get big. Weight of a typical car: 4,000 lbs. Weight of a typical delivery drone: 80 lbs. Typical drone payload: 5 lbs. 5 mile drone delivery: ~2 kWh 5 mile car delivery: ~100 kWh So the breakeven is ~50 such items in one order.

mciancia 3mo ago
Lol, where did you get those numbers from? xD Tesla uses something like 15kWh per 100km, so 5 mile drive is something like 1.1kWh
- delichon 3mo ago
  Yeah I botched that. It's around 1.5kw/mile for an ICE car.
  - rootusrootus 3mo ago
    And ~0.25 kWh/mi for an EV
lesostep 3mo ago
math checks out, assuming typical car is flying

petra 3mo ago

Judging Amazon's social value by delivery efficiency is just wrong. Amazon's biggest benefit is that anything can be sold there. So now more problems in my life could have a solutions I can buy. As for the delivery? There are more efficient ways to send deliveries. People can pickup deliveries at work or the gas station on their way home. People don't care. How is that Amazon's fault?

gdiamos 3mo ago
I wonder if Amazon eventually gets cut out by 3D printing/replicators for imitable objects.
SideQuark 3mo ago
So you replace a loop that delivers last mile goods to a lot of cars going decently out of their way to the limited places just to pick one item? Surely it’s less miles driven when Amazon does a loop hitting several people right near me than each of us driving farther in total to get our goods.
- petra 3mo ago
  I agree. It depends on how well the pickup points are located. Often Amazon can win. They also use EV trucks, and create jobs, so there are advantages.

1vuio0pswjnm7 3mo ago

Perhaps this is just slightly oversimplified Amazon goes to great lengths to make purchasing exceedingly easy and fast. And with Prime, customers can buy a single, low-priced item with no shipping costs, cf. the Costco requirement to buy in bulk quantities. As one would expect, this convenience and facilitation leads to more purchases. It also results in more packaging, more waste, more emissions, etc. This was detailed in a 2024 Netflix documentary that interviewed a former Amazon VP who was fired for her environmental activism https://www.netflix.com/title/81554996 https://www.netflix.com/title/81554996 She disclosed, brace yourself, that Amazon encourages people to buy stuff they do not need https://www.mirror.co.uk/tv/tv-news/former-amazon-employee-buying-hack-34081322 https://www.mirror.co.uk/tv/tv-news/former-amazon-employee-b... https://www.cnbc.com/2021/09/29/amazon-settles-with-employees-who-said-they-were-fired-over-activism.html https://www.cnbc.com/2021/09/29/amazon-settles-with-employee... Unlike Costco, Amazon does not disclose data on its environmental impact, e.g., carbon emissions. It's possible Amazon's impact is less than Costco's, Costco's data shows its impact is relatively severe, but if that were true, then why not share the data Is driving to a warehouse, retrieving items in bulk, paying for them and driving the items home, i.e., offline shopping, as easy as placing an order on Amazon Of course some HN reply will say "yes", implying that the former Amazon VP's story is false Let the reader decide who to beileve

bombcar 3mo ago
If you don’t think Costco encourages people to buy things they don’t need you’ve never shopped at Costco. Anyway, my 55 gallon drum of mayonnaise is starting to go bad, got to make a run.
phil21 3mo ago
You know how Costco constantly moves some of the usual “staples” they have around the store randomly? And how Costco can never be relied on having the same item outside of those core products every time you go to the store? Better buy it now since next month they may no longer have it and you need to wait 6mo before you see it again - if ever. That’s on purpose to induce you to wander the store more and “discover” items for impulse purchasing. Costco absolutely optimizes as much as it can to induce impulse buys. Pretending they don’t is a weird take. Amazon might make it more frictionless, but every retailer out there is doing this sort of thing. I kind of prefer amazons way of doing it since it doesn’t introduce friction to my buying experience and waste my time. Costco is also world renowned as a meme for peak American style consumerism. I say this as an executive member who also buys a lot off Amazon. They are just yin and yang of the retailer experience. I don’t really see one as more evil or better than the other - just totally opposite business models.

UltraSane 3mo ago

Costco's trademark is pretty large minimum size containers which reduces transportation costs.

zerobees 3mo ago

Cuts both ways. When I go to the grocery store, I buy 30-40 items at once. When I buy them Amazon with Prime delivery, I usually order stuff piecemeal, in the heat of the moment. Sometimes, Amazon will consolidate two orders in a single package. Sometimes, they will ship a single order in three boxes that arrive in different trucks.

s0rce 3mo ago
But there are 100+ items for other people on the route on each delivery truck each day. So maybe better than individuals driving to the store. If you don't drive to the store that will for sure be better but thats abnormal in america.

jasondigitized 3mo ago

How many items does the average consumer buy when they go to the store? It's not one.

thephyber 3mo ago

It’s much more complicated than that. In a society where everybody is already driving to school, work, food, shopping medical appointments, gas stations, kids sports, etc this is just a marginal additional trip for the consumer. Having redundant logistics companies (USPS, FedEx, UPS, DHL, Amazon, WalMart, Uber, etc) all making deliveries optimizing for something other than _minimum distance traveled_ means they aren’t optimizing for the same thing the consumer would. Also, there is the game theory aspect. When a consumer mentally thinks they can just make a $5 purchase on Amazon and get it delivered the next day “for free”, they are less likely to take care to shop in bulk / batch their purchases. Nobody goes to CostCo for a $5 trip (except for the weirdos who go there just for the hot dog / pizza lunch). I personally don’t like the hassle of CostCo for less than a $200 shopping trip.

deleted 3mo ago
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kbenson 3mo ago

> Ok, so 100 people can all drive to the store, or one delivery truck can drive to everyone's house. Whether you see that statement and read it as "obviously the delivery truck is better" or "obviously, going myself is better" is going to be primarily based on how far away from Costco you live, and how much you buy when you go. I live a bit more than a mile away from Costco. I often buy 25-60 items, for each of the about weekly trips. There's enough large items that a normal delivery truck that could safely navigate and stop often in residential areas would have no change of fitting 100 people's purchases into it in a way to be easily offloaded (just the toilet paper and paper toweling would take up significant space). It's much less wasteful on almost all metrics for me to go to Costco. That's before we get into the fact that most of what I'm buying is produce and other food stuffs I wouldn't want shipped for worry they would spend longer than I wanted out of refrigeration. If I lived an hour away that calculation turns out entirely differently, at least as long as there's enough people close by with purchases to gain efficiencies of travel.

randycupertino 3mo ago

I think online ordering is more wasteful because people order the wrong thing and don't know what sizes fit so they often buy multiple sizes and return or toss the ones that don't fit. This article where they buy a pallet crate of returned amazon clothing is pretty crazy- it was all polyester crap! https://www.nytimes.com/wirecutter/reviews/mystery-amazon-pallet-unboxing/ https://www.nytimes.com/wirecutter/reviews/mystery-amazon-pa... I saw commentary from a garment designer that there is enough clothing currently unused on earth to clothe the entire next six generations even if we completely stopped all production now. At least in person people can try the stuff on and ensure it fits.

smashah 3mo ago

Carbon offset credits bought by Bezos' Yacht holdco.

kelnos 3mo ago

Amazon's logistics and approach discourage bundling, while Costco's in-store approach incentivizes it. So it's more like 100 people drive to Costco, and they each buy 20 items and drive home. Or one Amazon delivery truck makes 1000 separate deliveries over the span of a week, because those 100 people made 10 different orders each, only ordering 2 items at a time. (I've even run into the situation where two separate Amazon orders made on the same day [because I forgot something in the first order] will arrive two days later, on two separate trucks, at two different times of the day.) This part bears repeating in a different way: if I go to Costco and get 20 items, I drive there and back once, on one day. If I order like people typically do on Amazon for those same items, I have a truck/van visiting my address 5-10 times on a bunch of days over the span of two weeks.

didntknowyou 3mo ago

costco buyers typically buy in bulk and fill a pantry in one go. i doubt one truck can fill 100 pantry. maybe a few products each

phil21 3mo ago
Costco can only fill maybe half my pantry because they don’t carry everything I like to eat or use regularly. They do a form of cherry picking the easy high volume stuff, and let other retailers deal with the harder more expensive low volume products. Certainly useful to optimize their bit of the supply chain, but they only can really account for maybe a quarter of the food items we eat, which accounts for a third or maybe half of total product volume any given month. The rest needs to come from additional store runs or Amazon.

messh 3mo ago

The argument is that people driving will each buy a lot though, not a single toothbrush. So 100 people driving will deliver as many trucks and would drive much less overall

hibikir 3mo ago

It depends on the lived environment. In my US suburban house, a 20 minute drive from the warehouse/Costco, absolutely. In the Spanish town I am in, where I can do 10 errands in an hour ln foot, as basically every street level space is a store, and streets are themselves narrow, Amazon's logistics advantage loses to the Asian bazaar.

alephnerd 3mo ago
Costco's Spain operation is primarily for logistics and product test, not market penetration. Costco usually tests suppliers' packaging and logistics for products at their ExAmerica warehouses before deciding on exporting that vendor's product to NAM. This is how Costco became the largest alcohol exporter in Europe, why most frozen fish at Costco is soured from Iceland, and how Chinese, Japanese, and Korean goods and vendors are tested before selling at Costcos with large Asian American populations.

deleted 3mo ago

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underlipton 3mo ago

It should be, "One delivery truck drives to several manned neighborhood drop-off points a couple of times a week, and 100 people walk to those points and walk home with their packages." Central distribution points that you have to drive to are as untenable long-term as everything being delivered individually. Frankly, this goes for food delivery, too.

elfly 3mo ago

I have to assume that unless the cost of buying at costco and driving back home is higher than buying it all at amazon and having it delivered. The total price + driving cost is a good proxy for how efficient the whole process is; amazon will somehow include in the price somewhere the delivery home, and both companies largely won't subsidize their whole business method. Social value is a little trickier; a lot of people benefit much from delivery, but in the end people probably don't buy everything from amazon or costco anyway.

alsobrsp 3mo ago

I live in a smallish city, we have a lot of stores I can shop at and a Costco within a 30 minute drive. For me, incremental marginal cost of the delivery is negligible compared to me driving to a couple stores, not finding what I need, and still ordering online anyway. In general, I go to stores to get something that I know they have, not because they have "pallets of goods"