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When I was an undergrad back in 2005, I bought my groceries online from Waldbaums with a $10 delivery fee - which was more than justified given that I'd usually shop once a week and would buy more than I could carry on a bus.

They ran their own delivery van around town; you got to pick a two-hour window during which the van would arrive.

Your future has already happened, and lingered unnoticed for quite a bit. I still don't understand why it didn't catch on back then.

Indeed, Tesco in the UK where doing 8% on home delivery about 3 years ago. Can't find more recent numbers but you have to think it's 10-15% now. Anecdotally at least it's not uncommon to see the delivery vans around.

Also companies like Ocado, which is exclusively online, and started operationally in 2002 I believe.

> I'm intrigued by the future we will be living in where everything will be delivered to us.

Future? Welcome to the 1800's. Every little shop in town had delivery boys. The lady of the house could walk to a dozen shops, inspect wares and purchase everything for the week. Didn't have to carry anything back herself though - a fleet of delivery boys would distribute the day's purchases.

(I'm not saying it is a bad future.)

This wasn't exactly by choice though, not everyone had the means to independently go to the supermarket and buy their groceries

Everyone had the means to purchase the groceries also had the means to go to the store. Carrying the groceries home was not an absolute necessity.

There were definitely social stigmas and various social stratifications that prevented people with the means to pay from engaging in 'normal commerce.'

I remarked to my younger Indian colleague that we're replacing tiffin-wallahs with grubhub for work and I'm not sure that's a positive development for the West and its various peoples.

You are already looking at the future of optimized infrastructure, as people have always moved homes to where the jobs, commerce, schools are. I think the're s a certain balance point. If everything is delivered, people will just spread outwards.

I now expect to go to Whole Foods and get upsold on a washing machine at the check-out counter...

All joking aside, I wonder if they will keep Whole Foods focused on food, or if that will be the doorway to brick-and-mortar retail—i.e. same day pickup services and the like.

You may see Amazon lockers in them, but that's probably the sum of it. Beyond that Whole Foods is just a perfect way to establish a delivery service: high prices and large footprint.

In India this kind of delivery is still the norm from local grocery shops as labour is cheap and the shop always sells the products at maximum retail price without any discounts.

"Drone mesh network" is discussed in another thread today.

Btw does anyone know if Amazon sells customer data for advertising? (Besides their own purposes)

1. David Foster Wallace is commenting how one has to do the work to manage stress and bias. That's the truth, you work for it. You running away the stress by deferring it to someone else to handle (the delivery person or the warehouse picker) undermines his whole point.

2. So now instead of 50 cars, it's 1 truck with 50 people's worth of individually packaged goods that gets trashed.

Cattle also feel pretty good about fed three times daily before getting slaughtered.

1. A lot of the stress, at least imo, is in knowing what to get, how much to get, and balancing that against constraints like what's available at the store and price. Having to make a string of smaller decisions. Being able to do this online makes things a lot easier. I really doubt that outsourcing the mechanical part of it all - picking up, hauling, taking home the groceries - is going to stress out the workers to a comparable degree.

2. Sure, except a vehicle getting trashed will be much less likely if 50 cars are reduced to 1. Not to mention the increase in productivity due to 50 people not losing time by sitting in traffic, or being at risk of bodily harm.

Don't understand your cattle point.