Comment by djsumdog | Hacker News Reader

Comment by djsumdog | Hacker News Reader

The thing that bothers me, about the retail space at least, is the increasing amount of waste and the increasing amount of consumerism.

Many people buy PC components from Newegg or household goods from Amazon when they might be an entire $5 more at a retail store. The retails store version you can actually see and touch (more important for a bathmat, less important for a video card) and they're shipping in packages of 100 or 500. Stores typically do recycle all their cardboard.

You buy it on-line, and it comes in a box. And those boxes add up, and many of them don't get reused or recycled depending on what part of the world you live in.

Amazon pushes people to buy more through their ecosystem. We're buying more stuff we don't need than ever, and generating more waste than ever. Their dash button felt like the ultimate consumption waste tool. Amazon is pushing us into a world where we are continually buying.

I'd rather we live in a world where we buy more are, fewer goods (with what we do buy being more expensive but durable). What a great world if our cellphones and devices lasted 8 years instead of 2. A world where we could buy independent games and media and know the creators got a full 85%~90% like with Bandcamp instead of the current bullshit 66% they get from Apple/Google/Amazon/Steam/Gog.

A world where we spend less on goods and the goods last longer; a world that lets us spend more on art, could greatly reduce our overall pollution (not just the symbolic and useless measure of carbon) and could help create a more Army of Davids type world where people can legitimately live off their art.

Even if the stores are more efficient with packaging/recycling, consumers still have to go to the store. What is the carbon footprint of 500 people driving to the store and back vs a UPS truck delivering 500 individual cardboard boxes? I don't know but I suspect that UPS is going to be smaller.

If you're walking to the store because you live in a walkable neighborhood, it's zero. If you're going to the mall and buying a dozen things from a dozen stores, the carbon footprint per purchase is probably lower than if you're buying a dozen things in a half dozen separate transactions online. Not to mention all the boxes and the energy and/or trees needed to produce/recycle them.

"As long as you live in an atypical situation where all your material needs are within 15min walking distance from your residence and you're affluent enough to not notice retail markup the issue you bring up isn't a problem."

I think that says more about the sad state of the living situation we Americans have engineered ourselves into over a few generations, with suburban sprawl and car culture, more than anything. If we think about it even just a tiny bit, it seems absurd that the majority of our society has little choice but to live in a situation where most of our material needs aren't a 15 minute walking distance away.

Replace "engineered ourselves into" with "chosen to" and you will realize the actual problem facing anyone who dislikes cars.

If you want to get rid of personal point-to-point tranportation tech, you have to provide something more convenient or get more coercive than most of the country has the political will for. Walking in winter cold or summer heat simply isn't that for most people. People enjoy privacy, people enjoy personal space, people enjoy their own music and conversation, etc.

It's similar to how you won't roll back the clock on iPhones and Facebook simply by posting nostalgic articles for the way things used to be. You have to address the added utility that has caused the adoption.

iPhones and Facebook, for all their issues, were adopted by the masses by competing in an open market.

Mass motorization and suburbanization were driven by government policy and still are. For every consumer dollar spent on driving, the government spends ten (wish I could cite this, but I can't find it at the moment).

I'm not saying cars aren't appealing, or that they don't have utility, just that the situation most Americans find themselves in, where the built environment favors cars to the exclusion of all other modes of transportation, is the result of public policy interacting with (or distorting) markets rather than a pure expression of individual preference.

I totally disagree. I personally don’t like cities, congestion and apartments. I would pay more to stay in my home with a yard. Most home owners aren’t in homes because of lower costs - this meets our living style priorities best.

I look at my Amazon orders and the last 9 things I ordered, I would be very surprised if they were available within a 15 walk in any city in the world, including Manhattan. A very specific model of travel duffel, a Belkin adapter (maybe), a couple pieces of non-common audio gear (yes, if I lived a 15 minute walk from B&H in New York), a specific Chromebook power adapter (who knows, I'd still be looking), etc.

Sure, in a dense enough area--which I don't live in; I'm basically rural--things like basic grocery shopping are a short walk away. But lots of the things I order from Amazon would probably take some serious looking around even in Manhattan.

Very little of what I buy online is available near me.

I'm going to guess "about $5," or however much you save by using Amazon. Bezos isn't dumb.

That's, IMO, a very strong argument.

A lot of this waste is a function of population density. With a super-dense city, where almost every conceivable product is within walking range (and, as a bonus, it's expensive to move around in cars) and prices are normalized, retail stores make sense. As the density drops down, people get into cars and often ignore their local stores, driving far out chasing rare items or discounts. Which is stupid (gas costs too) and wasteful in aggregate at the same time.

In addition, building construction has a massive carbon footprint. Concrete creates 5% of the world's CO2 [1], not even counting the energy used in construction. Home delivery from a distribution center eliminates stores. Seems like that will bring massive energy savings.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Environmental_impact_of_concre...

After having stepped into a Best Buy for the first time in a while, And living in walking distance from a former RadioShack, it’s not that these things are $5 cheaper, it’s that they either just don’t exist in person or they are like 1.5x as expensive if you do find them. Couple that with the fact that I can shop online while waiting for the bus, and we’ve got an unbeatable advantage for online shopping

Exactly!

I recently needed an HDMI cable. At Amazon, it's like $7. The ones that Best Buy/Target/etc have are around $12-$15. For surge protectors, it's been a toss-up as to whether they have something that I think I'd trust, or something that is Barely Adequate. For finding an X-to-Y (e.g. HDMI to DVI-D) cable or adapter, good luck -- they often list it and then say, "Oh that's not an in-store item".

It's especially egregious with books! Every time I am in a bookstore and see something I might like, I nearly always can find it on Amazon for about 2/3 of the price (or less if I buy used). If I'm browsing fiction for something to read, but am not desperate for a particular resource, what am I paying for?

I hate boxes, but it's rare that my "Must have it now" impulse outweighs the knowledge that I could get the item for much cheaper. I do hate cutting down boxes, though. =/

At this point, given Amazon's increasing reputation for selling knockoffs, I would rather trust big-box stores with any purchase more than $50, or on anything more complex than a coffetable.

Do they mix knockoffs with the Amazon Basics stock? I've bought a few cables and stuff from there and they've always been pretty good, but I don't think I'd buy from any other seller there/be comfortable if I wasn't getting Amazon's stuff.

But more expensive things (say and iPad or MacBook) are the same price.

Lack of availability is the real killer for me. Walk into a Best Buy, and you'll be able to take your pick of a zillion different car chargers, and they must have something like 200 square feet devoted to cell phone cases. But all of that is stuff I'm not going to bother hauling myself all the way to Best Buy for, because Walgreens is just around the corner and has that stuff, too. Things that you'd actually go out of your way to try and find, like, say, a decent-quality tablet stylus that isn't the Apple Pencil, just aren't to be found. Even the selection of things like keyboards and mice is weirdly spotty.

Most of my shipments come in standard-size boxes with air-filled pouches.

What if these were rented from USPS, re-usable, and highly durable? What if the mailman picked up my empty shipping containers for re-use? What if the shipping containers had inflatable bladders to hold the contents steady and absorb shocks?

I share your concern about excess consumerism, but it's hard to say that the old advertising-driven model was better. The very essence of broadcast media was trying to expose viewers to propaganda aimed at encouraging purchases. Malls are (or were) large spaces devoted to almost nothing else but shopping, and we built ridiculous numbers of them.

I seek things online often because I can find better products from specialty online retailers and I'm willing to pay a premium to get them. Traditional retail stores sell almost exclusively from the low end of the catalog; the low price, disposable SKUs. If it were possible to find Engineer brand tools at Home Depot or Keysight instruments at RadioShack or professional grade Addonics peripherals at Best Buy (the very sort of durable, non-disposable products you have prescribed for us all) I'd shop there, but they can't afford to stock their shelves with such things.

I don't believe the caricatures you've populated your mind with -- thoughtless consumers obliviously smashing the "Buy Now" button -- represent reality. There certainly are reckless people pissing away excessive disposable income, but most people put a lot of thought into their purchases and are not in need of your high wisdom and discipline.

I suspect you're not estimating the overhead of a retail store correctly. There's a lot of packaging and shipping and overhead that you don't see, but it's still there.

Additionally, you're ignoring the very real cost of failed purchases. You go to the retail store, they don't have what you want so you go to the next store, they don't have it either, you go to the next. They have something that's close enough so you buy it but then you end up replacing it after 5 months with what you really wanted. Meanwhile, with the online store the experience is very different, you find what you want, you research different options, you buy it and you're done. A lot of times being able to "put your hands on a product" isn't helpful. Many times you can't even do that in a retail store, you can see the box, that tells you nothing more than the online experience. When you shop online you can take the time to shop around, look at reviews, look at professional recommendations, etc.

I'm going to offer a counter-argument to your characterization of the dash button as the "ultimate consumption tool." Dash doesn't work that way. Its like a to-do list. You press Dash, and the item is queued up to ship. People don't press "Tide" over an over, people press it when they run low on Tide. No extra Tide is purchased in the economy.

There's a case to be made that its a lock-in button. I might buy some other brand if its on sale at Safeway, but that other brand doesn't have a dash button next to my washing machine.

Btw, my wife got our son a Kraft Mac-n-cheese dash button when he went to college, at considerable risk he would just go into the mac-n-cheese business.

Btw btw, we're a "Charlie's Soap Laundry Powder" household (no dye! no scent!).

The solution for box waste is recycling or reuse.

In Finland there is RePack https://www.originalrepack.com/ UPS has Express Envelopes. Amazon has Ships in Own Container.

Industry can solve the problem with reusable containers. If you pay small deposit for packaging the first time and you can easily return them it's problem solved. RePack can be returned by dropping it into mailbox.

I seem to have terrible luck with opened packages at retail stores. I don't know if its the employees or customers that are doing it but nothing is worse than taking your expensive electronics home only to find out you weren't the first one to open the box.

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