The next revolution is zoning reform so it's legal to build shopping people want to do within walking distance of where they live.

I could imagine Amazon incentivizing reusable containers on their own TBH. If I was living in a house and not an apartment, I could easily imagine putting the Amazon bins back out so the next time I get a delivery, they take those, and we are constantly cycling bins back and forth.

Even environment aside, from a purely self-interested perspective, I would much prefer it to dealing with the recycling Amazon deliveries entail.

That idea is intriguing but brings up a lot of questions. If I live out in the middle of nowhere, order something but take a long time to open it, when does the Amazon truck come back to take the packaging? If there's a million of us procrastinators, is it really that much better than normal centralized garbage collection? Milk bottle delivery and collection only worked because the product naturally had a time limit, and once home refrigeration took off, the practice went away because people didn't consume on the same schedule.

FWIW most Amazon packages I get nowadays are just heavy paper anyways.

In fairness, Amazon does seem to have improved in this regard. There's less plastic and fewer comically oversized boxes.

You're assuming working from home automatically makes you far from delivery options. It all depends on your walkability and drivability score. I'm residential, but I have retail delivery options within a few miles. So, the nuance really depends on where things will go from and to.

It's still probably more efficient for you to just drive to the centralized place.

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.

In the US, most people don't their shopping near the office. In Renton (commute into Seattle), it was commute to and from, then optionally local grocery stores to and from. WFH has dramatically reduced our driving which is a bonus over time saved.

Standardized packaging would be more robust, thus smaller as it wouldn't require filler material to protect the shipped item. Thus, volumetric cost would get lower and if ALL shipping had standardized packaging worldwide, it would probably make sense financially, too.

Amazon already delivers to the house next door to yours. The incremental cost of an extra stop is near zero. The efficiency of home delivery vastly exceeds people going to the shops themselves, even if they are stopping at multiple shops.

Anything to avoid walkable neighborhoods, naturally.