Yeah, this argument falls flat on it's face. Of course it's more complex than that.

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.

I go to Costco when I have something else to do in the area; It's almost never a "trip to Costco" for me.

Others have mentioned the parking lot sizes. If we wanted the best of both worlds, we could have online shopping at Costco with curbside delivery. There has to be a warehouse somewhere which means there are trucks/trains/planes moving goods around regardless. Even Amazon builds warehouses closer to where things need to end up eventually to optimize costs. You are comparing apples to oranges.

Finally, Costco delivers if you really don't want to leave your house. Now we are back to the same model but with far more flexibility.

Those individual trips to the store are typically for more than single items, and are often incorporated into trips one would have taken anyways as part of the doing of errands.

It's a little my complicated than that though, I'm very rarely driving to the store for a single item.

When the Amazon truck drives down my street it’s always stopping at 5 houses or so. So the marginal cost of my package is practically zero.

Also, in the photo, it shows a huge car park. The stores, have to support large empty spaces for parking of those 100 people all driving to the store. I also wonder about the social value of utilizing the land that way.

Perhaps this is just slightly oversimplified

Amazon goes to great lengths to make purchasing exceedingly easy and fast. And with Prime, customers can buy a single, low-priced item with no shipping costs, cf. the Costco requirement to buy in bulk quantities. As one would expect, this convenience and facilitation leads to more purchases. It also results in more packaging, more waste, more emissions, etc.

This was detailed in a 2024 Netflix documentary that interviewed a former Amazon VP who was fired for her environmental activism

https://www.netflix.com/title/81554996

She disclosed, brace yourself, that Amazon encourages people to buy stuff they do not need

https://www.mirror.co.uk/tv/tv-news/former-amazon-employee-b...

https://www.cnbc.com/2021/09/29/amazon-settles-with-employee...

Unlike Costco, Amazon does not disclose data on its environmental impact, e.g., carbon emissions. It's possible Amazon's impact is less than Costco's, Costco's data shows its impact is relatively severe, but if that were true, then why not share the data

Is driving to a warehouse, retrieving items in bulk, paying for them and driving the items home, i.e., offline shopping, as easy as placing an order on Amazon

Of course some HN reply will say "yes", implying that the former Amazon VP's story is false

Let the reader decide who to beileve

It depends on the lived environment. In my US suburban house, a 20 minute drive from the warehouse/Costco, absolutely. In the Spanish town I am in, where I can do 10 errands in an hour ln foot, as basically every street level space is a store, and streets are themselves narrow, Amazon's logistics advantage loses to the Asian bazaar.

I never thought about it but doorstep delivery actually saves on emissions in a more optimized route. Interesting takeaway.

> Ok, so 100 people can all drive to the store, or one delivery truck can drive to everyone's house.

Whether you see that statement and read it as "obviously the delivery truck is better" or "obviously, going myself is better" is going to be primarily based on how far away from Costco you live, and how much you buy when you go.

I live a bit more than a mile away from Costco. I often buy 25-60 items, for each of the about weekly trips. There's enough large items that a normal delivery truck that could safely navigate and stop often in residential areas would have no change of fitting 100 people's purchases into it in a way to be easily offloaded (just the toilet paper and paper toweling would take up significant space). It's much less wasteful on almost all metrics for me to go to Costco. That's before we get into the fact that most of what I'm buying is produce and other food stuffs I wouldn't want shipped for worry they would spend longer than I wanted out of refrigeration.

If I lived an hour away that calculation turns out entirely differently, at least as long as there's enough people close by with purchases to gain efficiencies of travel.

> But to date it has still not been able to make the conversion away from being an online convenience store, which tells you something important about its model: Amazon is there to fill in the gaps of a dominant mode of goods procurement, not to replace it.

Either we can view single-packaged items as a gap in the goods procurement process, or we remove the means (Amazon) and view it as a forcing function to not have single-packaged items since a certain % of 100 people will start batching before they drive to the store.

Cuts both ways. When I go to the grocery store, I buy 30-40 items at once. When I buy them Amazon with Prime delivery, I usually order stuff piecemeal, in the heat of the moment. Sometimes, Amazon will consolidate two orders in a single package. Sometimes, they will ship a single order in three boxes that arrive in different trucks.

Came to say this, it would be hard to handicap this one. Shopping tends to be clustered, so if I’m methodical, I can go fill a car load with a lot of stuff and that might be more economical and environmentally friendly than the vans. But if I’m not, I could certainly see how it would be worse.

I wouldn’t feel comfortable saying it averages out to being better or worse.

I think online ordering is more wasteful because people order the wrong thing and don't know what sizes fit so they often buy multiple sizes and return or toss the ones that don't fit. This article where they buy a pallet crate of returned amazon clothing is pretty crazy- it was all polyester crap!

https://www.nytimes.com/wirecutter/reviews/mystery-amazon-pa...

I saw commentary from a garment designer that there is enough clothing currently unused on earth to clothe the entire next six generations even if we completely stopped all production now.

At least in person people can try the stuff on and ensure it fits.

For small items, add drones and the last miles savings get big.

  Weight of a typical car: 4,000 lbs. 
  Weight of a typical delivery drone: 80 lbs. 
  Typical drone payload: 5 lbs.
  5 mile drone delivery: ~2 kWh
  5 mile car delivery: ~100 kWh

The argument is that people driving will each buy a lot though, not a single toothbrush. So 100 people driving will deliver as many trucks and would drive much less overall

It might, but I go to Costco every 3-4 weeks. If I depended on Amazon for everything I'd be getting multiple deliveries per day because there is no disincentive to doing that.

Judging Amazon's social value by delivery efficiency is just wrong.

Amazon's biggest benefit is that anything can be sold there. So now more problems in my life could have a solutions I can buy.

As for the delivery? There are more efficient ways to send deliveries. People can pickup deliveries at work or the gas station on their way home.

People don't care. How is that Amazon's fault?

For the average person an Amazon package has amazingly lower emissions than driving to the store.

I'd be curious further upstream as well. How would it compare from whatever shared point of entry the two approaches would have, say from coming off a boat at a port to the end user rather than just comparing the last mile.

> I suspect delivery of single items cuts back significantly on trips to the store.

Amazon is also specifically incentivized to be efficient at scale, it impacts their bottom line to the point where they care about the shape of their vehicles. Individuals don't operate on the same scale so these sort of micro-optimizations don't happen.

costco buyers typically buy in bulk and fill a pantry in one go. i doubt one truck can fill 100 pantry. maybe a few products each

How many items does the average consumer buy when they go to the store? It's not one.

Amazon's logistics and approach discourage bundling, while Costco's in-store approach incentivizes it.

So it's more like 100 people drive to Costco, and they each buy 20 items and drive home. Or one Amazon delivery truck makes 1000 separate deliveries over the span of a week, because those 100 people made 10 different orders each, only ordering 2 items at a time. (I've even run into the situation where two separate Amazon orders made on the same day [because I forgot something in the first order] will arrive two days later, on two separate trucks, at two different times of the day.)

This part bears repeating in a different way: if I go to Costco and get 20 items, I drive there and back once, on one day. If I order like people typically do on Amazon for those same items, I have a truck/van visiting my address 5-10 times on a bunch of days over the span of two weeks.

It should be, "One delivery truck drives to several manned neighborhood drop-off points a couple of times a week, and 100 people walk to those points and walk home with their packages." Central distribution points that you have to drive to are as untenable long-term as everything being delivered individually.

Frankly, this goes for food delivery, too.

great for specialized items you want to pay premium for, awful for paper towels

Carbon offset credits bought by Bezos' Yacht holdco.

Costco's trademark is pretty large minimum size containers which reduces transportation costs.

Back in the day people weren't driving to Walmart or whatever all the time to pick up a thing they wanted/needed, they would do that if they needed it right away, but if they didn't they would just wait until they were already in the store for a weekly trip, or pop in if they happened to be driving by on some other errand they needed to run

But most people go to Costco for bulk buys. amazon deliveries are almost daily sometimes multiple a day and STILL have the same giant trucks dropping off product at distribution centers.

Prices tell this activity is very efficient and not burdensome on society.

It’s much more complicated than that.

In a society where everybody is already driving to school, work, food, shopping medical appointments, gas stations, kids sports, etc this is just a marginal additional trip for the consumer.

Having redundant logistics companies (USPS, FedEx, UPS, DHL, Amazon, WalMart, Uber, etc) all making deliveries optimizing for something other than _minimum distance traveled_ means they aren’t optimizing for the same thing the consumer would.

Also, there is the game theory aspect. When a consumer mentally thinks they can just make a $5 purchase on Amazon and get it delivered the next day “for free”, they are less likely to take care to shop in bulk / batch their purchases. Nobody goes to CostCo for a $5 trip (except for the weirdos who go there just for the hot dog / pizza lunch). I personally don’t like the hassle of CostCo for less than a $200 shopping trip.