"like so many rolls of toilet paper from Amazon"
Who the hell buys toilet paper from Amazon!?
Who the hell buys toilet paper from Amazon!?
Toilet paper is the one thing I do not want to run out of, so I always have plenty of backup. All of my bathrooms are well-stocked, and I make sure there's spare rolls in the basement.
When I replenish one of my bathrooms, if I'm getting low on spare rolls, I pull out my phone and order more off of Amazon. The price is quite similar to the grocery store, and it's about as easy to order more from Amazon as it is to put it on my shopping list and buy some at the grocery store.
BTW: I'm not as crazy as my parents. At the beginning of the pandemic we all had plenty of backup rolls, but my parents are a little neurotic and had my sister and I looking for their specific brand. (They think their septic tank will explode if they use anything but Scott.) I managed to get a giant box of Scott, with plenty of toilet paper for all three of our households, sent to my house. My parents refused to use it because it was 2-ply instead of 1-ply. When I finally went inside of their house when it was safe, they managed to hoard a 2-year's supply of toilet paper in their basement.
Sadly, this was right before the toilet roll shortage from panic buying before the first UK wave of Covid and she’d give them all away by that point.
Going in person to a warehouse style store like a grocery store or department store is becoming a quaint experience from the past (for us at least).
I can either add an item to a grocery list on my phone, or I can just order it from Amazon. I might as well just order it and "be done."
FWIW I live in a city and don't have a ton of storage space, so getting bulk prices from a warehouse store is impractical. TP and Paper towels come on subscribe and save and are cheaper than the corner store, and roughly the same as the grocery store.
I still shop in person most of the time because I like to pick my produce and the substitutions tend to be a mess, but delivery is great when things are busy or we want a bigger order.
I understand groceries delivered by Instacart etc., but I don't understand ordering bulk non-perishable consumables online when a one time trip to a wholesale store like Sams would be much cheaper and "greener".
Shipping to a wholesale store is obviously more efficient than to the last mile, I don't see how that's up for debate. Generally you run other errands as well.
I agree Instacart is probably garbage for the environment, because in the suburbs it's often a passenger car delivering for just one household, but that's just equal to the baseline.
They have to resupply. Bulk TP takes up room, a little amount of TP is inefficient.
In no way is getting TP delivered to you ever more efficient than buying from a wholesale store.
You're trying to justify it, for whatever reason. I'm not advocating to banish it, it just seems silly.
> and in a city they're already driving to your building (several times per day if it's big).
Yes they're driving around all day because everyone is buying stuff like TP lol.
- edit to reply below because post limit -
TP is a lightweight, large volume package. The more TP you order more frequently, the less space the truck has, the more amount of resupply trips needed.
The alternative (normal way) I'm proposing is not those cars filling the same void as the truck. It's that you should buy in bulk those items, directly, less frequency and leave more room for mass last mile delivery of items that are small / perishable / unavailable in bulk.
What sort of delivery mode is this statement supposed to defend?
I deleted a lot of text to substitute this simple question: if you wanted to bring toilet paper to all 250 apartments in our building, would you use a passenger car or a truck?
At the same time as groceries? No?
In my experience, which I acknowledge is limited to my circle, the only major errand for most households is bulk grocery shopping for the family or shared house. Note that "groceries" here means everything you buy in a big store or cluster of walkably-close stores, so it covers more than just food.
Other journeys in a vehible: A commute maybe, but those are separate journeys from bulk groceries because every household member is going to a different place. Also it's less likely to be in a car. Carrying large shopping bags on a train or bus to another city is not much fun.
Occasionally other trips to social events, see a doctor or whatever, but that's not going to happen in the same trip as bulk groceries.
There is nothing else regular that requires a journey in a vehicle.
Having a delivery driver do a planned circuit to multiple households to deliver bulk groceries is much less driving and pollution than having every household drive to the store and back.
Sure, that last mile is less efficient than shipping to the wholestore store, but that seems irrelevant to the point at hand. It's still much more efficient to do the last mile in a single planned circuit than multiple last miles where everyone goes in and out separately.
TP ships to grocery stores in cardboard boxes too; if you buy the large sizes, they just put the shipping label on that box.
- You don't have to handle the breaking down and disposing yourself.
- How many people doing this are buying 96ct boxes?
- It takes a ridiculous amount of space for last mile delivery especially if they are buying the 96ct box which would be the closest to efficiency of a wholesale store, but still not as good.
I'm not a eco-nazi so I don't really care to squabble over emissions, but it's a bit silly, do people in LA not do wholesale runs a couple times a year for bulk items? It just seems wasteful for the delivery system and yourself, financially and otherwise.
On top of that we live in an apartment building, and a single truck makes deliveries for dozens of, if not a hundred, households (there are 250 units, and multiple trucks arrive each day). Imagine if all of us drove cars to accomplish this instead.