Man, I remember how fucking exciting it was to get a big box of diapers plunked down on my doorstep. What a thrill to know I’d be well-stocked for about four days.
How much does this actually matter though? At some point, especially in denser areas, the delivery trucks are going to go near everyone’s house every day anyways, so there’s no benefit to batching shipments (and it might even harm things if you bunch things up so that trucks aren’t running full every day).
Likewise, I live in a high-rise with Amazon lockers, and I’m sure there is at least one Amazon van delivery daily. Consequently, I assume it doesn’t matter (comparatively) with respect to carbon footprint on how many days per week I receive a package–and 90% of the time it’s a necessity that would have required me going to the store.
yeah, population density helps a lot. deliveries in rural areas are more predisposed to higher carbon footprint per package than those in urban environments. it’s also really expensive for the public because it’s like 100x more road to build, which doesn’t carry the same amount of traffic per mile.
Not to get all Luddite here, but some anthropologists have suggested that excluding the past 50-75 years, life after the development of agriculture wasn’t necessarily better than being a hunter-gatherer.
I’ve taken to ordering most of my pharmacy/health and beauty/household/cooking oils, etc. items from Amazon. I hate the feeling of going to the supermarket and then realizing later I forget to buy a needed item. My kid laughed because in my new apartment I now have a fully (overly?) stocked linen closet full of soap, toothpaste, shampoo, COVID kits (x8 boxes), masks, etc. I call this “cozy security.”
In fact, it’s great for household items that are heavy or bulky. No more wrestling with a 12-pack of paper towels on a grocery run if I can go downstairs to the Hub and bring it upstairs on the elevator.
‘It was a bit nerve-wracking but I had previously gone through security with a normal plug-in without incident so I had a sense of calm and faith that we’d both make it through