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Comment by Talyen42 | Hacker News Reader

The efficiency and environmental impact from delivering a single $5 item in a large cardboard box, possibly multiple times a day, several days a week via gig economy couriers is disgusting. I literally cannot leave my apartment complex without driving around Amazon vans parked in the middle of the street every single day.

At a minimum, without even shipping more items, the result of gig couriers vs. fedex/ups is 2.7x the number of vehicles on the road (due to size difference).

It also gets around legal liability costs, since you can just create and destroy hundreds of gig courier corporations around the country when issues arise from "pushing the envelope" in terms of safety and policy.

Can you imagine the world we would live in if 90% of current retailers went to the Amazon ecommerce + gig courier model? Our infrastructure (primarily roads) would immediately fail.

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Wouldn't it make it better? It seems far more efficient to have 1 car drive an optimal route to 500 houses delivering items than have 500 cars all drive to 1 store to pick up their items.

Beat me to it. I can't imagine how even with the boxes(many which are recycled) it is less efficient for a single route driver to replace hundreds if not more individual trips for the same result.

For me, it’s a 45 minute drive to Wally World. There’s a Safeway 25 minutes away but it’s a tourist town so everything is double priced. Many of my neighbors and I have started using HelloFresh and Amazon delivery for most things. In casual conversation we talk about how our miles driven has decreased drastically. For our community, delivery seems to be “greener” than each of us driving 90 minutes for groceries 1-2x/week.

Depends on delivery density.

Apartment complex with loads of items delivered each day? Makes sense, though packaging is still environmental overhead. Lots of single family homes ordering individual items distributed across suburbia? Less efficient than customer driving to the store once a week to get everything they need.

You are assuming they only go to the store once a week; and that there isn't a cost to them not having what they need when they need it. The cost can be in reduced productivity/time loss, etc or it can be in over-provisioning in which you buy extras that aren't needed (and may never be used).

Lots of assumptions and unknowns.

Implement a carbon tax and watch the market reconfigure itself.

Also: let's re-legalize corner stores!

Just because a carbon tax re-organizes the market doesn't mean that the organization that it "chooses" is good.

It means the reorganization will optimize for less carbon usage though, which I happen to think is pretty good.

Electric vehicles might complicate things some (they still present some other negative externalities despite using less carbon); perhaps at that time we can look at other incentives or taxes.

Those suburbanites probably work in a high density office building.

Amazon would deliver to the trunk of their cars.

This should be the top comment. Every time I think having a package delivered to my door would be more costly I take a minute and do the math.

Amazon operates two fulfillment centers in my city. Target has something like 30 stores.

If I get in my car and drive 3 miles to buy some aftershave, how is that more efficient than a truck with 500 individual items, distributing them from house to house, sometimes driving no more than a few hundred feet between drops?

Maybe we should make it illegal to drive to the store for anything, and have people use delivery services because of the reduced environmental impact.

Truly land of the free!

Apparently HN doesn’t like sarcasm

When I had Amazon Prime, I would buy items more often than I do now that I have to make a trip to the store (or pay for shipping) to purchase. For me at least, it's not a one-to-one exchange of miles on the road.

The right answer is to do what many other cities across the world do, have stores close to where people live so they don't have to drive those 500 cars.

That might be the most optimal solution, but I wouldn't take it as a given. You may have less individuals getting things delivered, but then you're giving up prime real estate and causing more decentralization of population, which brings its own inefficiencies.

You might still be imagining it in terms of how it is done in the US. You can have department stores on the first floor of dense housing, so people only need to walk to the store. The real estate is essentially what would be a bar or restaurant but serves more people and gives people what they need. You're right if it means turning a block that could be housing into parking and a walmart. It's better than a walmart being a 10 minute drive away from where you live, but it's only half way to how it can be (and often is elsewhere).

This reminds me of when I needed to connect a screen 3 or 4m from the source. I needed to buy a hodge-podge of connectors and cables Because of local store stock-limitations, instead of 1 cable that did it all that I could buy online now.

Even in Europe with public transport to the stores, I would bet delivery is many times more efficient.

The only question is whether people buy so much more due to convenience that the maybe 50x efficiency gain gets offset by 50x more items ordered. But I don't think that's the case.

Would be interesting to know the numbers. It's a bit like IKEA, their furniture requires less energy to produce and ship but does the resulting cheapness cause people to buy significantly more?

I don't think I buy significantly more stuff than I otherwise would just because it's convenient from Amazon, but perhaps I do.

Furniture is large; you can't buy significantly more sofas and closets. It may be cheap but still not throwaway cheap.

Small items easily available via Amazon are much easier to hoard.

inner city real estate is more expensive and so would the prices be ,defeating the whole point

If I order an item from Amazon, Target, Mouser, and Walmart, they're probably going to arrive in four boxes by four different carriers under the Amazon system. If they all used USPS, they might all be delivered on the same day by one carrier.

And yet it’s somehow cheaper than using USPS.

USPS has failed at taking advantage of its network effect.

The USPS may be burning their network effect benefits on universal service.

Sending a few letters from Manhattan to Nome for 50 cents snuffs out the profits from a lot of Amazon packages.

my favorite anecdote for this was kozmo.com - one person in the office would order a pint of ice cream, it would come 30 minutes later, followed by a cascade of ice cream orders and delivery people showing up to the office.

induced demand, and somehow they didn't make it up in volume.

I really miss Kozmo. I remember showing the service to my dad and us testing it out by ordering one of the harry potter books shortly after it came out and a pint of Ben & Jerry's.

It's definitely better. Amazon's business model is inherently more sustainable than traditional brick mortar, they essentially remove a step in the value stream.

For a brick a mortar store (and this is a little oversimplified), it goes manufacturer>warehouse/distribution center>store>customer drives to store. Note too, that the last step is usually store(s) plural unless you're doing all your shopping at a place like Walmart.

For Amazon, they cut out that entire last step and replace it with a model where a multitude of people can have their needs fulfilled with efficient routes.

USPS comes daily to my house anyways (usually to deliver junk that I don't want)... seems like it should be feasible without causing chaos...

Same-day-delivery is kinda solved in other countries - read more on stories of Meituan[1] or JD.com[2]. Granted, the labor cost, infrastructure are different. But answer is probably not gig-economy delivery but self-serve lockboxes, robots or drones. By the way, delivery workforce use electric mopeds, not diesel vans like we do here in America.

[1] https://www.scmp.com/tech/apps-social/article/3025295/meitua...

[2]: https://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/jdcom-speeds-packag...

I really wish I could pick up Amazon packages at a lockbox. I live in San Francisco, and Amazon's checkout process tells me the closest location I could pick up a package is at Berkeley's student union, across the bay, which is a good 30-40 minute drive (each way) unless I'm very lucky with bridge traffic. It's an hour using transit, including two transfers and 15 minutes of walking, which isn't really doable if I have anything but the smallest of packages to pick up.

I get that real estate is expensive in SF, but it's a little insane we can't do local pickups. It would be cool if Amazon could make an arrangement to drop packages off at USPS post offices; there's one a few blocks from me. Not as convenient as delivery to my apartment, but eliminates problems around package theft and delivery drivers unable to get into my building.

Maybe ask your local whole foods to add some Amazon lockers? They added those to the whole foods next to me.

They don't have lockers in those Amazon Go store's? That is très weird.

Where do you live in San Francisco? There are tons of Amazon Lockers there where you could pick up a package.

Here is a search on Google Maps.

https://www.google.com/maps/search/Amazon+Lockers/@37.758045...

Are you sure? Instead of driving to the store they drive to me. Why is it worse?

Maybe it wouldn't be so bad it there wasn't such a hurry. It's the next day or possible this day delivery that makes this so bad.

When people go shopping it's same day too, no matter how small or trivial the item is.

people usually don't go shopping every day possibly multiple times a day. Whereas Amazon gives them the ability to order things such that a car drives up to their house and delivers stuff multiple times per day.

Quite the opposite, people usually don't actually go out shopping just for a single trivial item, they delay the purchase until some later time when they go shopping for some important item or many trivial items at once.

Splitting the same total purchases in many separate "shoppings" is the fragmentation problem that causes much more "delivery events".

I find plenty of instances of people buying 1 thing at a store so it goes both ways. Regardless, the marginal cost of adding an extra stop to an optimized delivery route is very low compared to a shopping roundtrip for a single consumer.

It's more like, instead of you and each of your neighbors driving to the store separately, you're driving to the store alone and getting groceries for yourself and all your neighbors at the same time.

People don't usually drive to the store every single day for a single item, whereas amazon would deliver a single item to people every single day.

That same delivery vehicle can service 100s of homes at once though, which is why it's more efficient regardless of 1-day delivery windows.

I'm sure they could do a better job of batching deliveries for a single drop off per day but I don't think that's as bad as it might seem considering the overall reduction in consumer-to-store travel.

I hear you. This to me seems like a trivial problem however. Just limit it to X number of packages delivered to your door, per week.

Amazon would fight that tooth and nail, and very likely win.

X number of packages would lock in inefficiencies. X number of deliveries would promote efficient delivery (at the expense of timeliness).

Amazon tries to encourage this by using a "delivery day" for all your weekly deliveries to come. They need to incentivize it a bit harder I think with free digital content. If I could rent a movie from prime (not something new but let's say original Matrix) in exchange for using the prime delivery day option then I probably would. Otherwise they are relying on people to realize that constant deliveries are a problem and then sacrifice existing conveniences they have for that problem.

Maybe that's why they don't "fix" the Amazon Logistics service. Force you to get all deliveries when you are home and you might as well pick a time slot dor that.

Amazon does have a feature where you can pick a day of the week to get all your packages. I don't believe people really use it though, because what's the incentive to wait longer?

That's for people who will be away from home and don't have a secure drop off for their packages.

I'm fairly surprised Amazon doesn't incentivize its use outside of that use case, though. It's presumably cheaper for them to deliver a week's worth all at once, labor wise, and they already do $1 Kindle credits for slower shipping.

When I tried this I was hoping there was some reduction in packaging associated. At least for me, it was just all the same boxes on the same day, instead of one big box, or something reusable/returnable like Fresh.

Right, so just add the incentive... Seems pretty straight forward.

Limited by the government? That would be a nightmare to legislate and enforce.

This would be difficult to enforce, and given commerce laws I'm not sure it would even be legal. That said, you could use some form of congestion pricing for delivery vehicles, but unless those costs are somewhat punitive, any costs would probably just be pushed back into the price of Amazon Prime.

The revenue generated could be used to help pay for other transit and transportation infrastructure though, so on the whole could be quite positive.

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