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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 h

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.

newaccountman2 3mo ago
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.
- imoverclocked 3mo ago
  "Amazon bins" ... or maybe just reusable bins that aren't specific to a company? See: shipping containers. A standard bin for home delivery could still have "Amazon" painted on it but the rest of the infrastructure wouldn't be Amazon specific.
- dpark 3mo ago
  Amazon 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.
  - scrame 3mo ago
    I quite often get inappropriately sized boxes.
    - dpark 3mo ago
      I do too, but also sometimes the boxes are the correct size. With standardized bins I imagine they would rarely be reasonable.
    - danudey 3mo ago
      I remember reading somewhere that the boxes are not sized to the items they contain, but to a combination of 'items they contain' and 'space we need the box to take up on the truck'; i.e. if you have five items of one unit size in a six-unit-wide truck they will slide around (and potentially get damaged, fall over, etc), but if you put one of those items in a two-unit-size box then the boxes will not slide around, meaning that while the box is inefficiently sized in isolation it is optimally sized in a logistical context. I'm not sure how true this is, nor how reasonable it sounds since I don't know what the inside of an Amazon delivery truck looks like, but it sounds like the sort of thing that could be true in some circumstances.
      - rmunn 3mo ago
        I had heard the same thing from (if I'm remembering correctly about who told me) someone who has driven a UPS delivery van for 30+ years, so he has loads of experience with truck-packing. If he thinks it's true, I'm willing to believe him. And if I'm wrong about my source, the other person who I could possibly have heard it from is my friend who works at Amazon. As a sysadmin managing a small part of AWS, not in delivery — but he would also be in a position to know. Either way, I believe that's correct, that the oversized boxes are that size because they were being used as filler in the truck. The algorithm calculates the planned truck packing based on what items are going to be transported together (going to the same city therefore in the same truck), then picks out the box size that each item should go into. And most of them will be correctly sized, but in each row either zero or one (or possibly more in some cases) will be oversized.
  - MikeTheGreat 3mo ago
    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! :)
    - kjellsbells 3mo ago
      I see what you did there. Touché.
    - SllX 3mo ago
      They might have the ability to do so. The motivation? Well let me put it this way: I tried Amazon’s grocery delivery service, and stopped using it because everything—everything—kept arriving in its own individual bag regardless of whether it made any sense, so it was just a bunch of bags I had to carry upstairs. That bags also had no handles. So they were optimizing for something, but it definitely wasn’t packaging efficiency.
      - dpark 3mo ago
        Optimizing for dollar cost. Human time costs more than the extra packaging. Results would doubtless be different if they were optimizing for minimal environmental impact or produced waste.
      - fc417fc802 3mo ago
        Or the alternative that I occasionally encounter with non-grocery items - giant heavy item and small delicate item placed together in same box that is far too large for the both of them. A token piece of packing paper or lone plastic bladder tossed in, free to move about. The entire contents bouncing around. Another amusing one was when they packed a somewhat delicate pantry food item in a paper envelope. It arrived thoroughly crushed, exactly as one would expect.
        smelendez 3mo ago
        Yes. I recently tried ordering a standard cardboard tube box of oats from Amazon, and it arrived crushed and leaking in its presumably nonsterile paper envelope. They gave me a refund and told me to throw it out. I think this would have been much less likely to happen without the envelope, since whoever packed the truck would intuitively pack the tube vertically.
  - newaccountman2 3mo ago
    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"
    - rmunn 3mo ago
      I have been told, by (if I'm remembering my source right) someone who has worked as a UPS driver for 30+ years, that Amazon does that on purpose. Because the variable they're optimizing for is not "are we wasting cardboard". Cardboard is a renewable resource, which also recycles really well, so a little wasted cardboard is not a big deal. What they're optimizing for is packing the truck. Your item arrived in a too-big box, because that box (and the air within it) was calculated to fit exactly into what would otherwise have been empty space in the truck if the box had been smaller. In other words, you know how sometimes inside a carboard box, you'll find the item you ordered plus another smaller (and empty) cardboard box used for filler space? That's exactly what they were doing, with your box as the filler space in the truck so that other boxes wouldn't slide around and damage their contents. ... I see someone else has posted this elsewhere in the comment thread. Eh, I might as well post this anyway, because it's confirmation from a different source.
      - newAccount2025 3mo ago
        The other boxes would slide around anyways after your box was delivered tho?
        rmunn 3mo ago
        Yes, but by that time you're driving the truck around neighborhood streets, getting up to 25 mph at most before you stop at the next stop sign. Not nearly as much force being applied as making turns at 55 mph. During the long drive from the warehouse to that city (and the specific neighborhood), the boxes are packed in tightly. Plus, I seem to recall that they also optimize by giving the driver a route to follow and planning the boxes to be packed in order, so that only one row is being emptied at a time. I know my UPS driver friend has told me UPS does this, and it's an obvious optimization so I'm sure Amazon does it too.
  - llbbdd 3mo ago
    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.
    - dpark 3mo ago
      They must have been using different crates for you (different region or perhaps era). For me they were standard plastic bins[1] with a separate “cold bag” inside for frozen stuff. No actual styrofoam I recall, although this was also over 10 years ago so I could be misremembering. [1] https://www.uline.com/Product/Detail/S-9745G https://www.uline.com/Product/Detail/S-9745G
      - llbbdd 3mo ago
        The style of plastic bin definitely looks the same. The ones we were getting looked something like this[0], same folding-flap top as in your link but form-fitted insulation inside: [0] https://flexcontainer.com/product/insulated-molded-containers/ https://flexcontainer.com/product/insulated-molded-container...
        dpark 3mo ago
        Yeah. I’m not certain if the Amazon ones were actually the same as the ones I linked. But extremely similar at least. It’s been a long time. Very plausible that we did get the ones with the styrofoam sometimes and I just don’t remember. I know we got the cooler bag sometime.
  - Spooky23 3mo ago
    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.
  - rcleveng 3mo ago
    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.
  - spockz 3mo ago
    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.
- WillAdams 3mo ago
  Lee Valley will accept back boxes: https://www.leevalley.com/en-us/reuse-your-shippable-boxes https://www.leevalley.com/en-us/reuse-your-shippable-boxes (at their physical stores) You'd think Amazon could to that at one of their physical partners' locations.
ghaff 3mo ago
In fairness, Amazon does seem to have improved in this regard. There's less plastic and fewer comically oversized boxes.
- dexterdog 3mo ago
  Order whole foods from them. They will pack 6 things in 4 reusable insulated bags. The problem is there is no way to send those bags back to be reused.
  - cgriswald 3mo ago
    This must vary by region. We get paper bags with a reflective liner. They’re re-usable if the super adhesive they use for the label stickers doesn’t require ripping the bag apart to open it, but they’re definitely intended to be disposable. Sometimes they just use regular paper bags and let our stuff get warm. It seems random whether they stuff the bags to the gills or have a single item per bag. This happens with both Fresh and Whole Foods.
Zambyte 3mo ago
Anything to avoid walkable neighborhoods, naturally.
- cvwright 3mo ago
  [flagged]
  - inigyou 3mo ago
    When all the businesses embrace chaos and crime, capitalism has negative externalities. When all the compilers format your hard disk, programming has negative externalities. When all the candidates are flesh-eating bacteria, democracy has negative externalities. I can write implications with false premises too!
cyberrock 3mo ago
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.
- serial_dev 3mo ago
  You don’t need time limit, you just need to deal with the company frequently enough for this to work. How I would imagine this work if there was will (I don’t think there is)… there are online grocery delivery services that do this already, it’s not that complicated. You get your stuff delivered in a reusable bag. They charge you 1 dollar for the bag. Next time you have something delivered, you give the bags back and you’ll get your money back.
  - cyberrock 3mo ago
    That also leads to my other (perhaps main) issue with this idea, which is that it requires some level of coordination or synchronicity with the delivery courier that's simply inconvenient for both of us. I've lived in apartments that 90% of couriers of any service cannot find their way around, because they weren't simple take-elevator-and-walk-to-unit designs, so I thanked the stars when we got lockers at the gate. Perhaps I could leave my packaging in a locker... but that just sounds like we re-invented trash collection? And actually, this is why I never used grocery services like Amazon Fresh or Instacart. I don't think grocery delivery is as solved as you think it is. The implied time synchronicity also sounds like a nightmare. Taiwan does timed trash collection (you have to throw the bag into a garbage truck when it comes playing Fur Elise at 7pm) and there's a reason it hasn't spread. I just think this is overcomplicating matters instead of just making the package generically disposable, which seems to be what's happening anyways.
    - 3mo ago
scarab92 3mo ago
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.
- paulryanrogers 3mo ago
  > The incremental cost of an extra stop is near zero. This assumes folks get deliveries on the same day and largely only from Amazon. And that we cannot build more walkable / bike able infrastructure.
  - NavinF 3mo ago
    Amazon already gives a discount if you're willing to wait for them to batch deliveries. Personally I would still have an order arriving every other day regardless of walkable/bikeable infrastructure. Same as most Americans.
    - antiframe 3mo ago
      Do most American's have an Amazon delivery every other day? It's not what it feels like where I live, but I might live in a part of the country unusually avoiding Amazon. While I see an Amazon truck every day, they visit 1-2 houses around me out of hundreds. If feels like there are Amazon households that get a delivery every or every other day and non-Amazon households that order 1-5 times a year (if that) and batch their purchases from other retailers (physical or online). That's the genius of Amazon. Those that use them, use them a lot.
      - mlrtime 3mo ago
        That's not the real question.... The real question is "On my block, what is the probability of any given house having at least one delivery on any given day" I can say for certainty that Amazon delivers to my block every day. Adding 1 extra package is definitely more energy saving than me driving to Costco for the same thing.
Supermancho 3mo ago
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.
oatmeal1 3mo ago
The next revolution is zoning reform so it's legal to build shopping people want to do within walking distance of where they live.
- anon7000 3mo ago
  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.
- hx8 3mo ago
  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.
  - goosejuice 3mo ago
    250k skus seems pretty arbitrary. What's the significance of this number? A bodega goes a long way for most people's daily needs.
    - ElProlactin 3mo ago
      [dead]
bluegatty 3mo ago
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.
- glpgeFwac 3mo ago
  Home delivery being a first world luxury is a joke. Delivery is a labor intensive low-skill activity. It's fifty times better in developing countries, at least in the cities, where the marginal cost of sending someone to your house is so much lower. Unless you meant it's a luxury only in the first world, which I could get behind, especially food delivery.
  - bluegatty 3mo ago
    Food Delivery is a First World Luxury - meaning that it's the only scenario in which the system functions reasonably (aka it's inherently expensive, a true economic luxury). Food Delivery is Cheap in places where the system is completely defunct, it's not a luxury it's a sign of failure.
  - mlrtime 3mo ago
    Agreed with this statement. I've lived all over the world and have seen the wide differences. I still remember living in a large suburb in India (not in the city; people had cars). We sat down for dinner and I asked if they had any ketchup. The host picked up the phone, spoke for 10 seconds, and 5 minutes later a boy knocked on the door with nothing but a single bottle in his hand. There wasn't even a grocery store close to the house that I could see. Never living in any top-rated US cities have I seen anything close to that.
cromka 3mo ago
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.
WhiteOwlLion 2mo ago
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.

newaccountman2 3mo ago

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.

imoverclocked 3mo ago
"Amazon bins" ... or maybe just reusable bins that aren't specific to a company? See: shipping containers. A standard bin for home delivery could still have "Amazon" painted on it but the rest of the infrastructure wouldn't be Amazon specific.
dpark 3mo ago
Amazon 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.
- scrame 3mo ago
  I quite often get inappropriately sized boxes.
  - dpark 3mo ago
    I do too, but also sometimes the boxes are the correct size. With standardized bins I imagine they would rarely be reasonable.
  - danudey 3mo ago
    I remember reading somewhere that the boxes are not sized to the items they contain, but to a combination of 'items they contain' and 'space we need the box to take up on the truck'; i.e. if you have five items of one unit size in a six-unit-wide truck they will slide around (and potentially get damaged, fall over, etc), but if you put one of those items in a two-unit-size box then the boxes will not slide around, meaning that while the box is inefficiently sized in isolation it is optimally sized in a logistical context. I'm not sure how true this is, nor how reasonable it sounds since I don't know what the inside of an Amazon delivery truck looks like, but it sounds like the sort of thing that could be true in some circumstances.
    - rmunn 3mo ago
      I had heard the same thing from (if I'm remembering correctly about who told me) someone who has driven a UPS delivery van for 30+ years, so he has loads of experience with truck-packing. If he thinks it's true, I'm willing to believe him. And if I'm wrong about my source, the other person who I could possibly have heard it from is my friend who works at Amazon. As a sysadmin managing a small part of AWS, not in delivery — but he would also be in a position to know. Either way, I believe that's correct, that the oversized boxes are that size because they were being used as filler in the truck. The algorithm calculates the planned truck packing based on what items are going to be transported together (going to the same city therefore in the same truck), then picks out the box size that each item should go into. And most of them will be correctly sized, but in each row either zero or one (or possibly more in some cases) will be oversized.
- MikeTheGreat 3mo ago
  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! :)
  - kjellsbells 3mo ago
    I see what you did there. Touché.
  - SllX 3mo ago
    They might have the ability to do so. The motivation? Well let me put it this way: I tried Amazon’s grocery delivery service, and stopped using it because everything—everything—kept arriving in its own individual bag regardless of whether it made any sense, so it was just a bunch of bags I had to carry upstairs. That bags also had no handles. So they were optimizing for something, but it definitely wasn’t packaging efficiency.
    - dpark 3mo ago
      Optimizing for dollar cost. Human time costs more than the extra packaging. Results would doubtless be different if they were optimizing for minimal environmental impact or produced waste.
    - fc417fc802 3mo ago
      Or the alternative that I occasionally encounter with non-grocery items - giant heavy item and small delicate item placed together in same box that is far too large for the both of them. A token piece of packing paper or lone plastic bladder tossed in, free to move about. The entire contents bouncing around. Another amusing one was when they packed a somewhat delicate pantry food item in a paper envelope. It arrived thoroughly crushed, exactly as one would expect.
      - smelendez 3mo ago
        Yes. I recently tried ordering a standard cardboard tube box of oats from Amazon, and it arrived crushed and leaking in its presumably nonsterile paper envelope. They gave me a refund and told me to throw it out. I think this would have been much less likely to happen without the envelope, since whoever packed the truck would intuitively pack the tube vertically.
- newaccountman2 3mo ago
  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"
  - rmunn 3mo ago
    I have been told, by (if I'm remembering my source right) someone who has worked as a UPS driver for 30+ years, that Amazon does that on purpose. Because the variable they're optimizing for is not "are we wasting cardboard". Cardboard is a renewable resource, which also recycles really well, so a little wasted cardboard is not a big deal. What they're optimizing for is packing the truck. Your item arrived in a too-big box, because that box (and the air within it) was calculated to fit exactly into what would otherwise have been empty space in the truck if the box had been smaller. In other words, you know how sometimes inside a carboard box, you'll find the item you ordered plus another smaller (and empty) cardboard box used for filler space? That's exactly what they were doing, with your box as the filler space in the truck so that other boxes wouldn't slide around and damage their contents. ... I see someone else has posted this elsewhere in the comment thread. Eh, I might as well post this anyway, because it's confirmation from a different source.
    - newAccount2025 3mo ago
      The other boxes would slide around anyways after your box was delivered tho?
      - rmunn 3mo ago
        Yes, but by that time you're driving the truck around neighborhood streets, getting up to 25 mph at most before you stop at the next stop sign. Not nearly as much force being applied as making turns at 55 mph. During the long drive from the warehouse to that city (and the specific neighborhood), the boxes are packed in tightly. Plus, I seem to recall that they also optimize by giving the driver a route to follow and planning the boxes to be packed in order, so that only one row is being emptied at a time. I know my UPS driver friend has told me UPS does this, and it's an obvious optimization so I'm sure Amazon does it too.
- llbbdd 3mo ago
  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.
  - dpark 3mo ago
    They must have been using different crates for you (different region or perhaps era). For me they were standard plastic bins[1] with a separate “cold bag” inside for frozen stuff. No actual styrofoam I recall, although this was also over 10 years ago so I could be misremembering. [1] https://www.uline.com/Product/Detail/S-9745G https://www.uline.com/Product/Detail/S-9745G
    - llbbdd 3mo ago
      The style of plastic bin definitely looks the same. The ones we were getting looked something like this[0], same folding-flap top as in your link but form-fitted insulation inside: [0] https://flexcontainer.com/product/insulated-molded-containers/ https://flexcontainer.com/product/insulated-molded-container...
      - dpark 3mo ago
        Yeah. I’m not certain if the Amazon ones were actually the same as the ones I linked. But extremely similar at least. It’s been a long time. Very plausible that we did get the ones with the styrofoam sometimes and I just don’t remember. I know we got the cooler bag sometime.
- Spooky23 3mo ago
  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.
- rcleveng 3mo ago
  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.
- spockz 3mo ago
  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.
WillAdams 3mo ago
Lee Valley will accept back boxes: https://www.leevalley.com/en-us/reuse-your-shippable-boxes https://www.leevalley.com/en-us/reuse-your-shippable-boxes (at their physical stores) You'd think Amazon could to that at one of their physical partners' locations.

ghaff 3mo ago

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

dexterdog 3mo ago
Order whole foods from them. They will pack 6 things in 4 reusable insulated bags. The problem is there is no way to send those bags back to be reused.
- cgriswald 3mo ago
  This must vary by region. We get paper bags with a reflective liner. They’re re-usable if the super adhesive they use for the label stickers doesn’t require ripping the bag apart to open it, but they’re definitely intended to be disposable. Sometimes they just use regular paper bags and let our stuff get warm. It seems random whether they stuff the bags to the gills or have a single item per bag. This happens with both Fresh and Whole Foods.

Zambyte 3mo ago

Anything to avoid walkable neighborhoods, naturally.

cvwright 3mo ago
[flagged]
- inigyou 3mo ago
  When all the businesses embrace chaos and crime, capitalism has negative externalities. When all the compilers format your hard disk, programming has negative externalities. When all the candidates are flesh-eating bacteria, democracy has negative externalities. I can write implications with false premises too!

cyberrock 3mo ago

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.

serial_dev 3mo ago
You don’t need time limit, you just need to deal with the company frequently enough for this to work. How I would imagine this work if there was will (I don’t think there is)… there are online grocery delivery services that do this already, it’s not that complicated. You get your stuff delivered in a reusable bag. They charge you 1 dollar for the bag. Next time you have something delivered, you give the bags back and you’ll get your money back.
- cyberrock 3mo ago
  That also leads to my other (perhaps main) issue with this idea, which is that it requires some level of coordination or synchronicity with the delivery courier that's simply inconvenient for both of us. I've lived in apartments that 90% of couriers of any service cannot find their way around, because they weren't simple take-elevator-and-walk-to-unit designs, so I thanked the stars when we got lockers at the gate. Perhaps I could leave my packaging in a locker... but that just sounds like we re-invented trash collection? And actually, this is why I never used grocery services like Amazon Fresh or Instacart. I don't think grocery delivery is as solved as you think it is. The implied time synchronicity also sounds like a nightmare. Taiwan does timed trash collection (you have to throw the bag into a garbage truck when it comes playing Fur Elise at 7pm) and there's a reason it hasn't spread. I just think this is overcomplicating matters instead of just making the package generically disposable, which seems to be what's happening anyways.
  - 3mo ago

scarab92 3mo ago

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.

paulryanrogers 3mo ago
> The incremental cost of an extra stop is near zero. This assumes folks get deliveries on the same day and largely only from Amazon. And that we cannot build more walkable / bike able infrastructure.
- NavinF 3mo ago
  Amazon already gives a discount if you're willing to wait for them to batch deliveries. Personally I would still have an order arriving every other day regardless of walkable/bikeable infrastructure. Same as most Americans.
  - antiframe 3mo ago
    Do most American's have an Amazon delivery every other day? It's not what it feels like where I live, but I might live in a part of the country unusually avoiding Amazon. While I see an Amazon truck every day, they visit 1-2 houses around me out of hundreds. If feels like there are Amazon households that get a delivery every or every other day and non-Amazon households that order 1-5 times a year (if that) and batch their purchases from other retailers (physical or online). That's the genius of Amazon. Those that use them, use them a lot.
    - mlrtime 3mo ago
      That's not the real question.... The real question is "On my block, what is the probability of any given house having at least one delivery on any given day" I can say for certainty that Amazon delivers to my block every day. Adding 1 extra package is definitely more energy saving than me driving to Costco for the same thing.

Supermancho 3mo ago

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.

oatmeal1 3mo ago

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

anon7000 3mo ago
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.
hx8 3mo ago
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.
- goosejuice 3mo ago
  250k skus seems pretty arbitrary. What's the significance of this number? A bodega goes a long way for most people's daily needs.
  - ElProlactin 3mo ago
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bluegatty 3mo ago

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.

glpgeFwac 3mo ago
Home delivery being a first world luxury is a joke. Delivery is a labor intensive low-skill activity. It's fifty times better in developing countries, at least in the cities, where the marginal cost of sending someone to your house is so much lower. Unless you meant it's a luxury only in the first world, which I could get behind, especially food delivery.
- bluegatty 3mo ago
  Food Delivery is a First World Luxury - meaning that it's the only scenario in which the system functions reasonably (aka it's inherently expensive, a true economic luxury). Food Delivery is Cheap in places where the system is completely defunct, it's not a luxury it's a sign of failure.
- mlrtime 3mo ago
  Agreed with this statement. I've lived all over the world and have seen the wide differences. I still remember living in a large suburb in India (not in the city; people had cars). We sat down for dinner and I asked if they had any ketchup. The host picked up the phone, spoke for 10 seconds, and 5 minutes later a boy knocked on the door with nothing but a single bottle in his hand. There wasn't even a grocery store close to the house that I could see. Never living in any top-rated US cities have I seen anything close to that.

cromka 3mo ago

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.

WhiteOwlLion 2mo ago

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.