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Comment by dylan604 | Hacker News Reader

What it suggest to me is that delivery fees are too cheap. Amazon subsidizing shipping to the point customers expect same-day as an option on something as insignificant than it was just a simple button click. No other thought given to the actual cost. Where going to the store probably means putting on clothes, driving somewhere, dealing with other humans, before driving back. The original online purchase meant possibly saving taxes, but now everyone collects taxes so no savings there. If there was a tipping point of being able to save brick&mortar, COVID pushed it over to the non-recoverable side.

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On a per-customer basis the cost of last-mile shipping is just the cost of the truck driving from the prior delivery to your house. That's probably less than the cost of you driving to a store and back.

Conveniently ignoring the cost from the distro warehouse to the neighborhood and the return leg back to the warehouse. sure, it can be split amongst deliveries on the route, but it is not free

Retail is just a warehouse you walk into: they pay the same costs

Retail does not need to employ the fleet of drivers going door to door with those packages. The drivers need paid, they need fuel, the trucks need maintenance. Those externalities are made way more clear when someone has to get themselves to a store to pick up the item instead.

> Amazon subsidizing shipping

Do they still do this?

Do, did, does it matter. The sheeple are now hooked on the free shipping, and are now too addicted for how it happened to matter.

It matters. If it's not subsidized, it's not actually free, it's just baked into the price, and a large player like Walmart might be able to compete.

Which is possibly the bigger deal. Every time I shop at a specialty provider I end up frustrated by their lack of clarity around shipping costs - many will actually force you to go through the entire order process before giving you a shipping estimate, complete with collecting contact information.

Makes it very tedious to price-shop.

I will actually go out of my way to search for some suppliers on Amazon, eBay, Walmart, even Tictok before dealing with buying directly, just so I can rule them out if they're gonna pull a "$10 + $60 s&h" trick.

And... Again, this isn't new; pretty sure Ronco was doing this on TV before the Web.

And the old 10 CDs for $0.01 requiring a minimum full price purchase of some sort of subscription that is difficult to cancel has been around long before modern SaaS platforms.

The old "which long distance carrier do you want?" with an "I don't care" response resulted in you receiving the most expensive long distance plan from a company called "I Don't Care".

Just because scams/shaddy practices existed in the days of yore does not make them any more acceptable today.

Which is why companies that tell you what you'll pay up-front (Amazon, eBay) have made life hard for "traditional" sellers. Your sheep are tired of being fleeced.

What I find wild is at least at my walmart they pay the employees to shop for customers for their delivery service. Like how can that be cost effective? Walmart used to be a leader in tech in the 90s now it's applying ancient techniques to modern problems.

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