When I worked from the office, centralized retail was very convenient and hardly added any driving. If you work from home, the opposite is true.
The next revolution would be to standardize reusable packaging, that same daily delivery truck could bring that back. But only government could make that happen.
Realistically you aren't going to reach more than 250k skus within a 20 minute walk of your home, and probably less. Even this is very heavily biased towards using retail space instead of space for anything else (homes, restaurants, parks, offices). You can only build up to add more space within a 20 minute walk so much, because traveling vertically takes time.
With only 250k skus, you're still ordering from outside of walking distance often for items. This is much less variety then the average consumer is use to. Now, you have a dense area with lots of people and lots of business all needing goods brought in and waste brought. It's doable, but requires the right planned infrastructure, and people start trying to optimize the last mile with ideas like package lockers.
EDIT: It's probably possible to reach 250k if you heavily lean on books/cds/dvds with only a few copies each. The actual daily items you'd expect a store to keep in stock (and thus need more inventory of each sku) end up just consuming a lot of space.
Price conscious buyers will opt to drive to the bigger, farther away store because it has more variety, and the essentials are cheaper.
I know I do this.
Part of this is overregulation, with zoning and planning departments enacting policies that make smaller retail spaces less attractive to builders and owners, leading to a low supply, and allowing egregious rent for well located small retail.
Yes, economies of scale likely mean that larger businesses can afford lower prices, but smaller businesses also get to avoid some costs (no large administrative corporate departments necessary for a one-location bodega), so the prices probably don't need to be as far apart as they are.
Robinson-Patman is terrible law that’s more or less impossible to enforce equitably. So it hasn’t been.
I hope government representatives have things to say about that.
A world where it’s enforced uniformly and strictly might have some local benefits, but getting the government involved in regulating every wholesale transaction for “fairness” is a recipe for stagnation, corruption, or more likely both.
It’s much better for governments to be principled, and only interfere with mutually voluntary engagements by citizens when there’s an urgent harm to remedy.
Aldi and Lidl carry ~2-3k SKUs. A regular grocery will carry maybe 20k. In places where enough of these are built close to where people actually live you don’t ever need to touch the car for shopping. Small shopping centers (those that also have a something like a small book store) will add a few more thousands. A requirement of 250k SKUs in a 20min walking distance is going in the territory of once in a year or more purchases.
I think I drove to do groceries a handful of times in the last 10 years. I have multiple chains close enough that I can always walk, I can buy smaller batches and always have fresh food rather than a truckload to last a whole week but be stale by the end. Self checkouts and the abundance of stores means I have almost 0 wait time.
It can work but it has to be designed properly, and people need to change their habits a bit. Like not expecting hundreds of thousands of SKUs 10 min away at all times (which implies a huge store, so far from where people live).
Lidl also has this interesting approach that they rotate some assortment. You can't find everything all the time. But once you realize that certain things periodically come back, you pick them up when they are in stock to make sure you have them at home. It is not as convenient, but if you make it a habit, it is a very minor disadvantage.
But as you say the 20k SKUs premium stores stock aren’t a necessity. They drive up the costs for the store and the price for the buyer all so the buyer has the feeling they bought something different, when many brands are anyway the same product under different labels.
The premium store 3 minutes from my home stocks 30 types of mineral water. Aldi and Lidl stock maybe 3 of those 30. That’s what 99% of people buy anyway.
Until there's one less common thing you want. If you don't care much about flavour or have no taste in products then you can sub in any crap food or product.
I go to a particular supermarket because it has the tomatoes I like: they just can't be substituted. It also has an uncommon milk that is the only one I really like. The issue gets harder once you desire specific Deli foods.
How much of SKU selection is driven by individual consumer tastes? Some brand selection is driven by other causes.
250k SKUs means everything anyone would ever want. But the distribution of the demand for those SKUs is very lopsided. 20k are what everyone buys. Another 20k are probably things almost nobody buys. So how could you have both high and low demand items spread equally through a city without creating waste? If everything needs to be 10-20 min from you then somewhere a store is sitting empty with barely any customers or a shelf isn’t touched by anyone. The logistics for stocking and supplying products almost nobody buys costs everyone else.
As another point of comparison: Costco themselves say[2] that they have about 4k SKUs, and state that most supermarkets have about 30k SKUs.
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Anecdotally, I can find just about everything I want, in terms of consumables, at Kroger.
Sometimes I walk over to the bodega instead. They don't have much for inventory outside of beer/smokes/soda, and their selection of actual food is both limited and expensive. But it's only a block away, so...
[1]: https://www.foodindustry.com/articles/the-largest-supermarke...
I think people are underestimating the variety of products that are available.
But there is the added complication of weight. I can’t buy food for a week without driving there. Nor can I go and buy a TV by just walking to the hardware store.
> Nor can I go and buy a TV by just walking to the hardware store.
Do you buy a TV more than once every 5-10 years? You can rent a small van or whatever.
I'd grab one of those except for the fact that I don't have a sidewalk connecting me to the grocery store. Totes end up working better for me as a result.
And again, more limited space.
I commute by walking (1h per day) and typically avoid the car when possible, but for groceries there’s just no way I’d go back to walking to and fro.
It means my fridge can be smaller because I don't need to keep as much in there. It means it is really easy to shop whatever is on sale - I have two grocery stores near me. I rarely have vegetables that go bad because I can just buy the stuff I need. I can just stop on the way home from work if I'm working the day shift.
I did this for a while when I lived in the states, too, in a small town. I had a similar experience, but it was far less convenient and really only doable because I was in such a small town and lived alone.
If your events are regular, then you don't need to do the research each time either; and it becomes maybe an extra five or ten minutes.
Living without a car is easily possible, lots of parts of europe do it. They do it by living in small aparments, consuming less with more staples
I'm in Norway. Vehicles are expensive, children (regardless of age) are used to going outside and going to the stores. It is a common situation in larger cities. Heck, elementary children are often enough at the store unsupervised. I'm not sure why you think a 20-30 minute car ride plus at least an hour at the store is worse than a 20 minute round trip to the store with a 10-15 minute store break is bad, even if it is a few times a week. And even that can be avoided by just spending a little time on your way home from work.
I went to that grocery store twice yesterday (picked up a bag of popcorn and a bottle of water to go to the movies, then later some potatoes and sour cream for dinner). I'm going in a few minutes to get eggs for lunch. So three times in the last 24 hours :-)
You're not wrong, but millions (literally) of people do afford to live in NYC. I live in Harlem, which is more fun and more affordable than many areas.
I'm from Harlem, and other parts of NYC. I moved out to pursue a career in an industry that is relatively non-existent in the NYC metro area. If I moved back now I could probably afford it on my current salary. But there are no jobs there for what I do. And if there was a bigger tech industry in NYC the costs would likely be even higher.
Sure I could buy two or three different types of keyboards within walking distance, but none of them used my favorite mechanical switches. I was constantly facing choices where I would either need to travel by vehicle to a speciality store (train, bus or car), or I would order the item in. Judging by the flow of packages into my multi-residential building others were facing the same choice.
One of the major points(/claims?) of the OP article is that fewer choices is better, pointing to how Costco has just 4k SKUs (paragraphs 4, 5, 6, and some within later paragraphs). <shrug>
I don't even consider those when shopping online.
Its not that the ideas are bad or wholly wrong, but their is a sizeable contingent of followers who believe that walkable living is a silver bullet that fixes everything. Everything.
So to someone who happens to fall into contact with an evangelist, they sit and listen for a few minutes, and then come away like they just learned who the real God is. Any societal or personal illness you can think of, the Church of Fuckcars has a confident and surface level "makes sense" answer.
And this is ignoring the possibility of ordering less time sensitive specialty goods to a relevant store, where they can arrive on an existing shipment and share an errand with whatever else you might want from that store.
If you live in a dense environment where you don’t need a car because walking and transit cover your normal life, recouping that much money often more than pays for the higher cost per square foot of building space.
30% of New Yorkers spend > 50% of their income on rent.
My point was that’s a bit less than the median suburbanite here spends on housing and cars combined. That doesn’t mean either option can’t be improved but that these comparisons should compare the whole lifestyle cost. Otherwise you’re making the same mistake Americans do saying they pay much less in taxes than Europeans without including the additional spending we make for healthcare, college, childcare, etc.
Statistically, a large amount of that is beyond what they need most of the time (whether size, quality, or range).
It’s almost like the AI answering “should I walk or drive to the nearest carwash”. Sure I can walk, I just can’t complete the grocery shopping lol.
And then there’s heavier things to carry (drinks).
You go with the kids and/or wife and you do it on the way to or back from work or to/from school drop off.
You don't do dedicated grocery runs, they're detours on top of your existing trips.
Even environment aside, from a purely self-interested perspective, I would much prefer it to dealing with the recycling Amazon deliveries entail.
One problem with the bins for normal items is that rarely will they be packed to the brim. I imagine the overall item density would drop significantly if they started using standardized bins instead of appropriately sized boxes for the items.
I'm not sure how true this is, nor how reasonable it sounds since I don't know what the inside of an Amazon delivery truck looks like, but it sounds like the sort of thing that could be true in some circumstances.
And if I'm wrong about my source, the other person who I could possibly have heard it from is my friend who works at Amazon. As a sysadmin managing a small part of AWS, not in delivery — but he would also be in a position to know.
Either way, I believe that's correct, that the oversized boxes are that size because they were being used as filler in the truck. The algorithm calculates the planned truck packing based on what items are going to be transported together (going to the same city therefore in the same truck), then picks out the box size that each item should go into. And most of them will be correctly sized, but in each row either zero or one (or possibly more in some cases) will be oversized.
And once they do so they'll have solved two big problems! :)
So they were optimizing for something, but it definitely wasn’t packaging efficiency.
Results would doubtless be different if they were optimizing for minimal environmental impact or produced waste.
Another amusing one was when they packed a somewhat delicate pantry food item in a paper envelope. It arrived thoroughly crushed, exactly as one would expect.
I think this would have been much less likely to happen without the envelope, since whoever packed the truck would intuitively pack the tube vertically.
Breakage results.
I will note like the other person though that I often get like "just one thing in a box that's clearly too big"
... I see someone else has posted this elsewhere in the comment thread. Eh, I might as well post this anyway, because it's confirmation from a different source.
Plus, I seem to recall that they also optimize by giving the driver a route to follow and planning the boxes to be packed in order, so that only one row is being emptied at a time. I know my UPS driver friend has told me UPS does this, and it's an obvious optimization so I'm sure Amazon does it too.
Except: The hypothetical perfectly-packed 53' trailer that leaves the originating warehouse is not the same trailer that delivers stuff to my doorstep. Things get sorted and re-sorted as they move along. It ultimately becomes random instead of optimized, and these random giant boxes take up a lot of space in local delivery vehicles.
Besides, the exceptions can be too exceptional to support any notion of it being deliberate.
It's difficult to describe the biggest box I've ever gotten from Amazon, except to say that it was too big to fit onto the seat of the recliner by the door where I usually put these things. I've received full-size, assembled, 1990s tower PCs in smaller boxes.
Inside of that exceptional box was just 3 ethernet cables, each 1 foot long, that cost me less than $1 each. That whole box could have been a brown paper envelope.
The funniest thing I remember though is that the totes weren't optimized for the size of some of the products available very well - if you put a frozen pizza in it, it sat diagonally, and without enough room to really put anything above or below it. You order four frozen pizzas, and you're allocating many cubic meters of apartment space for them until the next time you order.
[0] https://flexcontainer.com/product/insulated-molded-container...
It’s been a long time. Very plausible that we did get the ones with the styrofoam sometimes and I just don’t remember. I know we got the cooler bag sometime.
They’d slice cold cuts in New Jersey, and have USPS bring it to upstate NY and deliver before 8AM. There would literally be a mail van with two orders in it.
So this seems like a pretty solved problem. Of course you have to be home to receive the cooled products. There are some startups that sell cooled boxes that delivery persons can open with a code to put stuff in but they are not popular. Since Covid people tend to be at home more often than before.
https://www.leevalley.com/en-us/reuse-your-shippable-boxes
(at their physical stores)
You'd think Amazon could to that at one of their physical partners' locations.
FWIW most Amazon packages I get nowadays are just heavy paper anyways.
How I would imagine this work if there was will (I don’t think there is)… there are online grocery delivery services that do this already, it’s not that complicated.
You get your stuff delivered in a reusable bag. They charge you 1 dollar for the bag. Next time you have something delivered, you give the bags back and you’ll get your money back.
The implied time synchronicity also sounds like a nightmare. Taiwan does timed trash collection (you have to throw the bag into a garbage truck when it comes playing Fur Elise at 7pm) and there's a reason it hasn't spread.
I just think this is overcomplicating matters instead of just making the package generically disposable, which seems to be what's happening anyways.
The amount of optimization and process improvements required to 'beat that' will be enormous, like infrastructural change enormous.
Your car is very useful an generalized and adaptable.
So are you.
Only you know what you really want, the nuances of comparison, seeing things real, returning them.
Economies of scale work extremely well for Costco.
'Home Delivery' is the operational argument that does not work very well.
If there were a hyper standard for mailboxes and automated delivery for tons of things - and - everyone bought into the same delivery standard, aka robots to the same warehouses, bringing multiple items to people on the same street - then that starts to work out, but we're a long ways away from that.
Home Delivery - in most situations - is effectively a first world luxury.
FYI - meal delivery depends on loopholes on migration, healthcare, work permits, working conditions that if they were all closed and up to standard - would make it just to costly in many situations.
Unless you meant it's a luxury only in the first world, which I could get behind, especially food delivery.
I still remember living in a large suburb in India (not in the city; people had cars). We sat down for dinner and I asked if they had any ketchup. The host picked up the phone, spoke for 10 seconds, and 5 minutes later a boy knocked on the door with nothing but a single bottle in his hand. There wasn't even a grocery store close to the house that I could see.
Never living in any top-rated US cities have I seen anything close to that.
The comments here always blow me away by how totally out of touch with the rest of the world many posters are. No, home delivery is not a luxury, it just works really poorly in your country.
India is going through a 15 minute or less delivery boom right now. It's gotten so popular that the government is asking companies to not promise 10 minutes because that would endanger drivers.
The standard is China is 30 minutes home delivery.
It has nothing to do with loopholes on anything. Just someone managed to convince you that what you've got is better than what exists out there already.
Yes, home delivery is a luxury, and it 'does not work' in India - it's only evidence of an utterly broken system.
It's a sign of radical inefficiency and economic failure that labour is being used for those kinds of things because it's extremely unproductive.
"It has nothing to do with loopholes on anything. "
--> it's entirely about 'loopholes' <---
Food delivery is not 'efficient' in India - it's the least efficient process imaginable - that can only work because 'loopholes' - marginal cost of labour is cheap aka no rights, no standards, high unemployment, low wages, externalizations and corruption, sketchy taxation, safety, social insurance, healthcare, emissions, food safety etc.
The only place in the world where 'Food Delivery Works' - is for rich people in First World countries.
That is the only scenario in which labour, rights, wages, taxation, non-corruption safety etc. are all met and the 'comparative value' (aka price) still works out.
That's it - the top 10% in the Denmark etc. can have their food delivered in a way that is 'economically efficient' (maybe >10% for some things) - aka those are the only people 'willing to pay a true fair market price when all of the externalizations are built into the model'.
We're making some progress with automation, probably China are leaders there but it's still not closed to automated and won't be because the marginal cost of labour is still low.
For the person getting the item, it is [extremely] productive.
What actually works is delivery of multiple orders to a semi-central location for last-mile pick-up by the customers. In a sense, this is what restaurants and grocery stores are. But to retain the variety, readiness, etc. of delivery, obviously some new solution must come around.
Not sure about India but delivery in China has everything to do with loopholes.
No health care and social security for most, and for the few who have the company artificially fake income for tax evasion.
Working conditions are the usual 12~14 hours a day with 2~4 days off a month.
The electric bike they are riding are dangerously over-limits and categorizes as motorcycles, which are actually banned in most big cities. Of the few that allow it, Shanghai for example, you need to pay ~$70k for registration alone.
In the US the situation is better but not free from problems, for example the first job for a lot of the illegal immigrants who can not speak English is package sorting with similar working schedule, but at least it pays good enough.
Home delivery in the U.S. is expensive because the labor cost is expensive, and because population is generally more spread out geographically. Cities in China and India have home delivery with much lower cost. But with the advance of robot technology, maybe not too far in future home delivery in U.S. could have lower cost too.
This assumes folks get deliveries on the same day and largely only from Amazon. And that we cannot build more walkable / bike able infrastructure.
If feels like there are Amazon households that get a delivery every or every other day and non-Amazon households that order 1-5 times a year (if that) and batch their purchases from other retailers (physical or online). That's the genius of Amazon. Those that use them, use them a lot.
I can say for certainty that Amazon delivers to my block every day. Adding 1 extra package is definitely more energy saving than me driving to Costco for the same thing.
In the city, I used to see multiple Amazon delivery trucks per day. On the rural road I now live on (dead end road with fewer than 30 households), USPS does most of the Amazon delivery, but this is somehow enough people that we see FedEx and/or UPS drive by pretty much every day in addition to USPS obviously driving by six days a week.
Given that they're also visiting the neighboring roads, it's definitely enough for an economy of scale.
I order amazon on average once every 3 weeks. My mother (who has full time career and is under 60 years old) has never used amazon. Other members of my family also seem to rarely use amazon.
Also, having an order arriving every other day is incredibly wasteful.