alt Hacker NewsAmazon did that with an earlier version of their grocery delivery service. I assume the cost and logistics of managing and cleaning the bins just wasn’t worth it because their grocery service delivers in paper bags now.
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.
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Our groceries from AH in NL come in foldable crates. The cooled items sit inside a plastic bag inside a foam box in the truck. The delivery person stacks the crates and foam boxes, brings them to your door, rings the bell. They hand the bag with cooled products to you and then you get the crates. You return the folded crates. This works just fine. They are also quite adept at filling the crates to a maximum. Unfortunately not always in the smartest way because they sometimes put the fragile things at the bottom and the heavy items like bottles of soda on top.
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.
That service was really weird. They had a special arrangement with the post office.
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.
OIC.
I will note like the other person though that I often get like "just one thing in a box that's clearly too big"
and webvan back in 2000 - both amazon's attempt and webvan are unfortunately gone - it's cheaper to throw away packaging away, and that's super unfortunate and sad.
I used this service before it rolled out widely and these boxes were a mixed bag. On one hand they worked really well, they were essentially insulated hard totes with styrofoam lining and often had dry ice in them for anything that needed to be kept cold. On the other hand, I lived in an apartment, so storing 3-4 totes for a week or more was a real chore.
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.
Well, if there's one company on Earth that's both incentivized to find an algorithm to efficient pack stuff into their shipping bins and also well-financed enough to actually figure out a good linear or quadratic-time algorithm to do so, it's definitely Amazon.
And once they do so they'll have solved two big problems! :)