2-3 times per day? Until transports are carbon neutral, free shipping should be made illegal....
What you propose would reverse that and increase carbon.
Its also worth pointing out theyre moving to electric delivery vans
You forget that by adding a price tag on delivery certain purchases wont be made. Also I would certainly batch my purchases instead of going three times a day to the retail store.
which seems like a reasonable assumption for anyone
- living in a rural area - living only close to a city but not within - city parts with poor public transport connections
Also, the kind of product also heavily influences that. For more specialized products, people tend to be willing to drive longer distances, therefore making the carbon emissions worse. If the store doesn't carry the item but has to order it first, it also means you double the round trips. Overall, Amazon certainly has a massive environmental impact, including GHG emissions, but in terms of emissions, everyone going to the store by themselves wouldn't really be a better option I imagine.
I know that the US is very different - many cities are not necessarily pedestrian-friendly - but over here, the idea that it's more environmentally friendly to have stuff delivered to you is definitely false.
Public transport is certainly better than in some other countries, presumably better than in the US. But it still has to become a lot better the be an actual complete replacement for a car for the majority of people.
Yes, some people, especially with kids, might take the car when they need to buy lots of stuff, but when it's "oh I ran out of milk", people will probably just walk to the nearest store, or take a bike, etc.
I think the context here was that some people were ordering from Amazon multiple times per week or so and claiming that that was environmentally friendly which I find... doubtful.
Absolutely not. There's plenty of people who live without needing cars.
Not the end of the world but it does annoy me. I’ve been doing a bunch of shopping at Target since the pandemic too, to balance out reliance on Amazon. They’re much better at delivering items together on the day they originally state.
Companies already have a natural incentive to batch orders, because doing so reduces their costs. I don't think you need to lean on them to do what they already want to do.
Public transit seems like a promising solution, but only goes so far. With the strong automotive industry here in Germany, there is no incentive to get cars off the streets.
Impossible. Even if the car is powered by renewable electricity, each trip to the store contributes to wear and tear on the vehicle, and the parts on the vehicle were almost certainly not produced with renewable energy but with polluting sources, and plus the industrial process producing them likely produces some toxic waste.
Seems like Amazon Day should be tied to an address, not an account, but I guess it's an edge-case not worth addressing.
You're totally right that some current "winners" who benefit from the current state of affairs are fighting and will continue to fight it. That's the case of any major change worth making, though, I think.
If that means giving Exxon, BP, Shell ... a trillion dollars to just cap all their wells and F'off.... fine. Amortize it over 100 years and pay it down with the tax revenue from carbon.
And the only viable alternative until very recently... nuclear... is endlessly disparaged as unsafe by 'save the earth' types. So as far as I'm concerned, the green movement is equally culpable on the lying front. Should we charge the Sierra Club luddites too?
I was recently looking at the courier's parcel tracking app, i was interested recently to see that my delivery was '120 stops away'. If this is typical, the marginal cost of delivering a parcel must be small in terms of miles driven and driver time. (Obviously this is highly contingent on population density).
Another good example of this is Royal Mail, where the cost of a marginal piece of post or small parcel must be tiny (since the postman is already delivering to 50%+ addresses every day).
It occurred to me that in some situations, it might actually be more efficient _not_ to batch. The complexity of attempting to batch at the warehouse must be very high, and take up quite a bit of warehouse space, and slow down dispatch significantly.
A related and relevant observations why are courier companies not a natural monopoly? If the marginal cost of delivery were high, a courier company with higher volumes would naturally make more profit, and so the market would push in the direction of fewer bigger couriers. This seems to suggest that the volume of parcels means that we're already in a situation where couriers are pretty efficient and marginal costs are low. It'd be interesting to know empirically how this works out.
I think you are onto something, that the courier business enjoys huge advantage from economies of scale. However, I think that there is no actual monopoly, because the advantage of higher volume in last-mile delivery probably saturates fast enough that you can take it all at relatively low total levels of volume.
For example, if you have higher volumes, you can optimize courier routes so that they waste less time driving around. However, at some point fixed per-package overhead like parking getting in and out of the truck, walking up to front door, etc become so large that time spent actually moving between deliveries becomes smaller and smaller part of your time, and so optimizing it becomes less and less valuable. Then, the issue is how much volume you need to hit that level, and I think that the answer is "much less than monopoly level".
In particular -> It occurred to me that in some situations, it might actually be more efficient _not_ to batch. The complexity of attempting to batch at the warehouse must be very high, and take up quite a bit of warehouse space, and slow down dispatch significantly.
If first-world countries and their citizens can't be bothered to reduce their consumption and behavior, why should developing nations?
Especially the comments about "batching orders" somehow having an impact is just ludicrous. Aren't we in a thread about a company forced to hire more people because of the amount of orders coming in, forcing more deliveries? How does it not click in your brains that more orders = more boxes = more resource consumption = more drives = more weight = more fuel consumption = more carbon?