As someone that has lived in a walkable neighborhood with a lot of shopping let me tell you, it doesn't solve the problem.

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.

I don't know about you, but I would rather not have stores near my home, for obvious reasons like noise, traffic, trash, etc.

It doesn’t solve the packaging problem. I live in a walkable place, and the sheer amount of single use packaging is utterly insane. They’re different problems that both need addressed.

Much more expensive when you have stores in the city so much cheaper to buy in larger surfaces in the suburbs

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