Is Christmas Efficient? (2013) | Hacker News Reader

Is Christmas Efficient? (2013)

marginalrevolution.com

43 pointsarcdefoo30 comments

we are over saturated with economic thinking ..at this point when I hear efficiency or competitiveness a suddenly have an uncontrollable reflex of throwing up

I get the hatred of excesses wrt finance/economics, to a point. Though I can't help but see comments against efficiency in general as a shift in the needle towards policymakers who bask in nimwittitude.

We're not over saturated with it, because in another universe: paper currency failed the vibe check because not-thinking-about-stuff was en vogue. I'm glad we live in this one.

That legit happened a few times in history until it stuck. Paper currency was invented and abandoned many times in history so we sort of do live in the timeline where it failed the vibe check, it's just such a good idea people kept trying it afterwards.

> nimwittitude

Is that the intellectual level of a witling?

Healthy employees do better work than unhealthy ones and happiness is a key component of mental health. Hence efficiency improves when employees have better working conditions.

how about transitioning to a non-commercial, cooperative "resource-based" economy then? we could need some help..

The real question is: "Is Santa (thermodynamically) efficient?" https://users.ece.cmu.edu/~andrew5/cute/engineer_santa.txt

https://memory-alpha.fandom.com/wiki/Inertial_damping_system

In terms of pollution/environment? probably not efficient

Good article.

I feel like it was more efficient in the past before Amazon. Now everyone buys online, you buy from Amazon sometimes you don't realize the product you just puchased wasn't even from Amazon but a third party seller. The product sometimes fake.

The dependency on the 4th quarter is just dumb.

Delivery is a lot more efficient than each person driving to the store.

Is that always true? Definitely if you are buying things from one place, but what if I drive a few km into town (in a hatchback), buy multiple things from multiple shops and drive back, how does that compare to getting multiple deliveries made by much larger vehicles?

Then there is that far greater amount of packing used for deliveries. The box you would find in the shop is packaged inside another box, often much larger. Then there is the far higher rate of returns.

IT may be true, buts its not obvious to me that it is.

Also the ease of buying stuff increases, so more stuff needs to be produced and transported.

It's been pointed out to me that how much stuff you buy is usually a function of your income, it may not matter how you get it.

A weak function is also a function. Also if your income is higher you probably buy stuff that is more expensive.

it is, but its not linear - the proportion of incomes spent falls as incomes get higher.

Yes and also spent on more durable items.

I would not underestimate the amount of resources necessary to support this brick-and-mortar stores model. You need to deliver those goods to each shop, then handle the returns of unsold items... Not to mention costs of employees (and their costs) — but that may be debatable, of course (creating jobs).

Yes, there are logistics behind shops. It is going to vary a lot with what you buy and from whom. Food is likely to be delivered from somewhere local AFAIK so its not going to simplify the logistics.

Buying from a shop does not necessarily mean driving to the shops: at the moment (and in some places I have lived in in the past) there are quite a few things I buy from local shops I walk to. In some big cities I would take public transport to buy anything that was not heavy (and really heavy things would be delivered anyway, of course).~

The point of want to make is that its not invariably true and in many cases it is not obvious it is true - you need to know how the supply chains work.

> Food is likely to be delivered from somewhere local AFAIK so its not going to simplify the logistics.

Delivered restaraunt food in urban enough areas sometimes from ghost kitchens, large commercial prep kitchens but making the full meal, instead of the restaraunt, but this may have died down after the pandemic.

But I wasn't taking about food delivery, more Amazon delivery van full of products vs something on the order of 1 million tons of vehicles driving to the store. Amazon vans can do 300-500 deliveries during Christmas, and personal cars have gotten heavier. It's vastly more efficient except where you could take the subway or something. But in large Urban places with subways the van may only have to go to a single building to drop off hundreds of packages in some cases so may still win out vs hundreds of subway trips.Couldn still win out,and especially if factoring in human time.

Big delivery trucks to a few rural stops might not be efficient, but when you order from rurally your packages might get dropped off by something like a Camry making 10 deliveries, I've seen that from Walmart orders, or a smaller US mail truck.

I just ride the bus to the mall. I also walk to the grocery store.

Return rates of brick and mortar are about 8-10%. Where as online and approximate 30%.

In addition to this the trash contributed to selling drop shipped Temu garbage.

There is tons of empty capacity back to the distribution center for returns

True, but its not efficient in terms of my time. It may not be true for all systems? The goods will also (hopefully, as the alternative is worse) be resold so there will be a second trip out.

Hey I'd forgotten about Marginal Revolution! I used to follow this blog several years ago, thanks for the reminder!

Interesting question but how would you prove any of it without a lot of natural experiments?

By adding a new gifting holiday in midsummer, for load-balancing. It's called "Amazon Prime Day".

It might get tricky. Midsummer already has a spending stimulus. Summer vacation is when people spend their money on tourism.

Imagine how much money Amazon could make if they invest money into convincing people that they should spend it on gifts instead of travel.

Who cares about tourism industry if you can take their money.

Maybe gift giving is lower environmental impact!

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