alt Hacker NewsAs 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.
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250k skus seems pretty arbitrary. What's the significance of this number? A bodega goes a long way for most people's daily needs.
For reference, Google tells me that the largest Argos stores in the UK have only ~20k SKUs in stock.
I suppose for the absolute majority of use cases, much less SKUs have to be present at store with immediate availibility for purchase, and the rest could be ordered online with delivery to the walkable store, resulting in efficient delivery and little effort required from customer, which isn't bad from health perspective.
I think it would still be a vast improvement if online shopping was relegated back to only a narrow set of specialty goods.
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.
I second. I live right above a shopping mall and next to Dongmen, which is easily one of the largest shopping areas in the world, yet I still end up ordering most things online.
A lot of trendy ideas have come out of the internet, but I don't think any of them have achieved the religious status of "fuckcars" (aka walkable neighborhoods).
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.
I live in a walkable quarter and I can reach three full supermarkets and 2 specialty supermarkets within 5 minutes. Doesn't matter whether I need to stock up on milk, vegetables or hand peeled shrimp in garlic sauce, I can get it. Same with public schools (5 within a 2 mile radius), childcare (3), hospitals (2) and the park.