The climate stakes of speedy delivery
axios.com
axios.com
This is silly when I don't care about speed. If I cared that much about getting items ASAP, I'd find it locally. The fact that I am ordering online means that I can wait. I'd prefer efficient delivery to ASAP delivery.
You assume that truck comes only with your product? It might be 100% stocked with goods.
And if you are talking about delivery guy coming to your place with a box, then if you wanted to buy it from store, you might also have spent as much as fuel to reach the store as that guy did from local fulfillment shop to your place. But how many times the guy comes with a single box? Routes/timings are optimized for max speed/utilisation and lower cost.
Fuel costs environment and company bears the cost of the fuel, to maximize profits, they might as well optimize their costs and as a side effect better environment.
I'd say we all should shop for everything online and it will give company best chance to optimize well.
Also, faster speed doesn't necessarily mean more cost.
I wanted a replacement desktop power supply ASAP; went to two PCWorlds which sold parts like graphics cards and hard disks; nope, didn’t sell power supplies.
I don’t know any more independent computer shops locally that haven’t shut down over the years, and ordered it on amazon for Saturday delivery - which was a much better experience and could have saved me miles of driving and half an hour or more of wasted time - with a better selection.
I guess you’re somewhere that next day shipping is not normal?
Tip: If you are ordering multiple things, you can often order N-1 of them with the delayed shipping offer and then order the last one with 2-day shipping and you'll often get the orders all picked and shipped together. (It's far from guaranteed, but seems to happen about 50% of the time, so you get the discounted digital offer and still get the items shipped efficiently and quickly.)
One delivery truck driving to everyone's home in a neighborhood is significantly less CO2 then everyone in the neighborhood driving to the mall!
> In theory, e-commerce is good for the environment... Instead of a neighborhood worth of people driving to stores in their personal cars to shop, one truck can deliver everything. But that calculus is changing.
It's the overall CO2 that matters - which stays opaque.
So there's buying extra for convenience vs impulse buying what you see. In my personnel experience shopping online, the impulse buys go away, but I make the shopping list the same way, with one big batch a week, so overall buying less.