But it is transported in bulk. It's not as if we're sending along semi-trailers loaded with a single tube of toothpaste - those things are packed to the brim with what other people have ordered.
The way I look at it is this: with a brick and mortar store you only have the efficient, bulk transport all the way up until the retail endpoint. Everything after that is somewhere between ludicrously wasteful, and terrifyingly wasteful. Even then, we can fulfill entire cities from a single (or very few) warehouses in an online shopping context, but retail stores require many more locations, each carrying a smaller amount of stock (much of which will remain unsold to be returned elsewhere), and situated according to the whims of the consumer, not the efficiency of distribution.
You driving to the store for your toothpaste may seem like a negligible amount of pollution contribution - but multiply that by everyone in your entire city, and suddenly hauling a fleet of semi trailers would seem downright clean in comparison.
With online shopping the shipping process remains bulk from the supplier all the way to your door - there is no SUV with a single passenger hauling 3 bags of groceries - that UPS truck is packed to the brim and has a highly optimized route. Not to mention, with consolidated inventories, overstock (and thus more transportation and garbage waste) is greatly reduced and you don't have the added transportation layer of distribution center -> retail store.
> You driving to the store for your toothpaste may seem like a negligible amount of pollution contribution - but multiply that by everyone in your entire city, and suddenly hauling a fleet of semi trailers would seem downright clean in comparison.
But I don't drive to the store. I cycle. Ever seen a UPS guy on a bike, delivering everyone's Amazon orders?
> there is no SUV with a single passenger hauling 3 bags of groceries
People doing that are, frankly, tossers. If you start from A and say "B is a great optimisation compared to A," then you are missing C,D and E, all of which are better.
As a practical thing Amazon could do, how about slipping a tube of toothpaste in with your regular books order, a few days before you would otherwise have ordered a new tube?
> But I don't drive to the store. I cycle. Ever seen a UPS guy on a bike, delivering everyone's Amazon orders?
How many of you are out there in the USA? Honestly, not many. The vast majority of Americans drive to get their groceries and get their shopping done. I hate to say it - but you're a relatively rare edge case.
There's also the unsolved problem of overstock - and the smaller the store (physically) the worse it gets. In order to maintain selection, brick and mortar stores must stock a large range of items, many of which sell poorly. Maybe in your entire city 5 units would get sold in a given month - but if there are 30 stores in the city, each one would now have to hang onto a single unit, since you don't know when/where a customer would want it. A great deal of overstock ends up in landfills, and even the stuff that does not, it requires further transportation to consolidate, and then even more transportation to liquidate.
For an online store, since a single facility serves a much larger number of customers, overstock is improved by leaps and bounds (orders of magnitude, really). This results in less garbage waste due to not having to stock a lot of stuff that isn't expected to sell, and less transportation cost also.
> how about slipping a tube of toothpaste in with your regular books order
The way I look at it is this: with a brick and mortar store you only have the efficient, bulk transport all the way up until the retail endpoint. Everything after that is somewhere between ludicrously wasteful, and terrifyingly wasteful. Even then, we can fulfill entire cities from a single (or very few) warehouses in an online shopping context, but retail stores require many more locations, each carrying a smaller amount of stock (much of which will remain unsold to be returned elsewhere), and situated according to the whims of the consumer, not the efficiency of distribution.
You driving to the store for your toothpaste may seem like a negligible amount of pollution contribution - but multiply that by everyone in your entire city, and suddenly hauling a fleet of semi trailers would seem downright clean in comparison.
With online shopping the shipping process remains bulk from the supplier all the way to your door - there is no SUV with a single passenger hauling 3 bags of groceries - that UPS truck is packed to the brim and has a highly optimized route. Not to mention, with consolidated inventories, overstock (and thus more transportation and garbage waste) is greatly reduced and you don't have the added transportation layer of distribution center -> retail store.